About the presentations:
Presentation #1: “Solidarity, Mutual Aid and Horizontality in the Anthropocene: Genealogy of Anarchist Thought and Enviromental Crisis in Latin America (20th-21st Centuries)” presented by Tomas Pino.
This presentation examines how Latin American anarchist movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries responded to contemporary environmental crises. Drawing on sources collected at the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir in Mexico City, the analysis highlights key discursive axes, including animal liberation, antiespeciesism, critiques of extractivist models of industrial capitalism, criticism of multinational conglomerates, and the development of anarchist ecological thought. The findings show that these movements articulated early proposals for a reimagined human–nature relationship grounded in solidarity, mutual aid, and horizontality. This research situates such responses within the broader Latin American context, demonstrating the innovative and socially engaged character of anarchist ecological thinking.
Presentation #2: “Teacher Development Policy Appropriation in Rural Peru” presented by Micaela Wensjoe.
This presentation examines how teacher development policies are understood and adapted in rural Amazonian regions of Peru. While global and national reforms often emphasize standardized training, they rarely account for the cultural and geographic diversity of rural contexts. Drawing on an anthropological approach and a comparative case study design, this research explores how educational actors interpret, adapt, or resist policies in ways that make them meaningful to their realities. The findings highlight the importance of recognizing policy as a dynamic practice shaped by local actors, underscoring the need for contextually grounded approaches to teacher professional development in Latin America, particularly in rural areas.
Presentation #3: “Drivers and Impacts of Cattle Sector Intensification in Brazil” presented by Tara Mittelberg
Presentation #4: “The Human in the Loop: Living and Laboring in Global AI Production” presented by Rachel Wei Fen Tan
Her dissertation, “The Human in the Loop: Living and Laboring in Global AI Production,” follows two groups of workers who sustain today’s AI economy: cross-border warehouse workers moving between Tijuana, Baja California and San Diego, California, and displaced Venezuelan data annotators in Bogotá, Colombia. Through multi-sited and digital ethnography, she examines how their labor—and the borders, platforms, and algorithmic architectures that govern it—make artificial intelligence possible. Rachel’s project reveals how automation relies on human lives, labor, and (im)mobility, and how global value chains extract from and obscure the lives of migrant workers, situating AI production within global circuits of extraction, precarity, and racialized hierarchies. Bridging political science, economic geography, and science and technology studies, her work contributes to debates on labor, race, and technology while grounding them in community-based research that takes workers’ lives seriously.
About the Presenters:
Tara Mittelberg is a Ph.D. student in the UW-Madison Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics (AAE) and Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). She is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and UW University Fellow. She has been a member of the Gibbs lab since 2021. Her research centers on agricultural sustainability, particularly in international supply chains that originate in tropical forest landscapes. She uses econometric methods to evaluate environmental and social outcomes of policies by private- and public-sector actors. Her current research is on the indirect effects of cattle sector intensification in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as policies to mitigate modern slave labor. (Link to working paper: “The Impact of the ‘Forced Labor Dirty List’ on Agricultural Transactions in Brazil”)
Previously, Tara was an analyst at NORC at the University of Chicago, where she researched international agricultural development, forced labor in garment supply chains in Bangladesh, and land-use and forest governance in West Africa. She was also a Fulbright Scholar in Londrina, Brazil, where she studied social barriers to the prevention of herbicide-resistant weeds. Tara received a Joint M.S. in Agricultural & Applied Economics and Environment & Resources from UW-Madison in 2023, and a B.A. in Environmental Sciences and International Studies from Northwestern University in 2017.
Tomás Pino is a Chilean PhD student in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research explores the Anthropocene geological era from intellectual and environmental perspectives, focusing on how global warming and climate change social movements in Latin America influence political decisions. He completed his MA at the University of Chile, where he focused on a conceptual history of the Anthropocene, examining its origins, uses, meanings, and ontological and epistemological implications for the humanities and social sciences.
Rachel Tan (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also earned a Certificate in Higher Education Teaching and Learning. Her research is on the global political economy of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a focus on the intersection of technology, labor, and borders. Apart from her dissertation, she also has an ongoing project on Indigenous politics across Latin America that traces how Indigeneity is constructed and mobilized in ways that reproduce imperial legacies, and how state-driven “multicultural inclusion” often generates new limits and harms. Her scholarship and teaching draw on ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, and she is deeply committed to interdisciplinary, community-engaged, and critical pedagogy. Rachel is currently the Lecturer for ‘Social Movements & Revolutions in Latin America’ at UW–Madison and will teach ‘Literature & Politics’ next semester. Rachel is also the 2025-26 Pre-doctoral Fellow of the Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy at Occidental College.
Micaela Wensjoe is a Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research examines teacher development policies in Latin America, with particular attention to how they are designed, implemented, and negotiated in rural schools. She holds a master’s degree in International Educational Development and Education Policy and a bachelor’s degree in Educational Psychology. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked extensively in education policy and research, taking on leadership roles in the public sector, focused on policy design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as in the private sector, through social organizations and research institutions. Her work has centered on school reform, teacher professional development, higher education quality assurance, and large-scale program evaluations, primarily in Latin America with some projects in other regions. Micaela also has experience as a researcher in qualitative and mixed-methods studies on teacher learning, education systems, and equity. Alongside her research, she has taught courses in psychology, education, and research methods at the undergraduate level and served as a teaching assistant and instructor in education policy courses.