Monday, November 20, 2023
5:30 p.m. Reception. 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Screening and Q&A.
True North Classroom, Stephen Robert '62 Hall, 280 Brook Street
Open to the general public. Pizza and refreshments will be provided before the screening.
Join CLACS and IBES for a showing of the critically acclaimed documentary film Maya Land: Listening to the Bees. Maya Land tells the story of the environmental conflict between GM-soy growers and Maya beekeepers in the Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. It reflects on what the environment and economy could look like if bee health was considered as a criterion of sustainable development. This film explores the pre-colonial and ongoing relationship between Maya people and their environment, in particular the milpa agricultural system (and its main crop, maize), sacred sinkholes (called cenotes), and sacred stingless bees, the Melipona.
This event is part of the Consumable Commodities Series (Honey), co-sponsored by IBES.
Panelists
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Postdoctoral Fellow, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow for Native American and Indigenous Collections (Brown). He has worked with Indigenous Chatino people and campesino communities in Oaxaca, México, exploring local knowledges and understanding of their landscape through their language. And examining, through the lens of political ecology, the effects of forest conservation and conservation programs on land commons, forest commodification and social differences (particularly, ethnicity and gender) among communities in the same region. At Brown he is working on a collaborative feature documentary on carbon offsetting projects in the Chatino region and co-writing, with a community leader, a paper on the current challenges and transformation of communal land tenure and agricultural practices. Along with collaborative documentary, he is interested in social mapping as an approach to communities’ geographies and the vast local knowledges of medical plants. Finally, he has worked with Anthony Ince co-authoring book chapters and an article questioning the centrality of state logics in current geographical imaginations.
Angélica Marquez-Osuña studies Latin American history, specializing in the environment, the circulation of knowledge, agriculture, and farming practices. She is currently writing her book on the history of beekeeping and industrial apiculture in the Americas, in the context of European colonization and Neo-Columbian exchanges. She is a 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University, and an Assistant Professor of Latin American History in the Department of History at Loyola University-Chicago beginning in the fall of 2024. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2023
