Dear LACIS Community,
Welcome to the beginning of the 2024-2025 Academic year! It was an exciting first year as your faculty director and I look forward to what this coming year will bring.
Hopefully you had a chance to join for one of our events or programs last year, or perhaps you were a recipient of one of our many faculty and graduate student funding opportunities! We’ve compiled an Impact Report to document everything that we accomplished between June 2023 and June 2024, and we think you’ll agree that it was a busy year!
A few highlights: We sponsored and co-sponsored 64 public lectures, spearheaded 24 unique K-12 outreach activities, offered 14 workshops, 9 film screenings, and contributed to 3 art exhibitions.
In terms of our support of faculty and graduate students on campus, last year we supported 12 graduate students from departments across campus with summer research grants, and 19 students with travel grants for conferences and other short-term travel. We were able to provide 7 LACIS affiliated faculty with travel grants and brought 9 visiting scholars and artists to campus through Nave grants. We were also fortunate to host three Tinker Visiting Professors and provided scholarships to three K-12 teachers to have their own study abroad experiences in partnership with Global Exploration for Teachers Organization (GEEO Group) in Bolivia and Spain.
We’d like to thank all the campus partners who regularly reach out for exciting collaborations. We would not be able to be so active without our fantastic collaborators including those in the Chican@ & Latin@ Studies, the Human Rights Program, the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and many, many others. And I’d like to personally thank the small team of LACIS staff who continue to do make our humble resources and energies go so far. Thank you especially to Alberto Vargas and Sarah Ripp, without whom LACIS would not exist, and to Maria Kraus, Francesco Liucci, Amaryssa Garcia, and Emmaline Secada, who were fantastic student assistants last year.
Now for what’s coming! I can’t preview everything, but let me give you a few teasers for what’s coming this fall that you can learn more about in our Noticias weekly newsletter, Instagram, or website:
- Tuesday, September 17, 12-1pm: LACIS Lunchtime Lecture featuring Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo to talk about his recent book: Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press) in a talk entitled “Puerto Rico: Interrogating the Idea of the Nation and the Politics of Memory.”
- Tuesday, October 29, 12-1pm: LACIS Lunchtime Lecture featuring Dr. Diego Román to talk about “Educación Intercultural Bilingüe in the Galapagos Islands,” examining the efforts of a migrant Salasaka Indigenous community from the Ecuadorian Andes living in Galapagos in establishing a bilingual Kichwa-Spanish school.
- Monday, November 4, 6pm for general public & Tuesday, November 5, 10:30am for middle and high school audiences: Film screening of “Home is Somewhere Else” with director Jorge Villalobos. This 2D feature “animentary,” or animated feature documentary, provides a window into the hearts and minds of immigrant youth and their undocumented families. It features three personal stories about undocumented youth to highlight the complexities and challenges they face today. Voiced by the actual children and their families, Home Is Somewhere Else invites discussion about the need for a new US migratory model based on respect for human rights for all. This event is co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Mexican Consulate, the UW Human Rights Program, the UW Cinematheque, and others. If you or someone you know is a middle or high school educator who would like to bring a group of students to the Tuesday viewing, please contact Sarah Ripp at skripp@wisc.edu.
As you can tell from these three events, we have a wonderful line-up of lectures and outreach events this fall. We hope you enjoy what we’ve put together, and we hope to see you soon at one of our events!