K E Y N O T E S P E A K E R S
SO N I A A L V A R E Z
Through the Leonard J. Horwitz Professorship in Latin American Politics and Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Sonia E. Alvarez is able to teach, write, think, and act as a catalyst for discourse about the Southern Hemisphere—an opportunity that delights her. The professorship was established by a bequest of Leonard J. Horwitz ’49 to promote study of Latin America, a region in which he served as a U.S. foreign service officer.A Cuban-American raised in South Florida, Alvarez earned her Ph.D. from Yale University. She dates her long relationship with Brazil to her first trip there as an 18-year-old; later she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo. Her research has also taken her to Chile, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Feminism in Movement, her newest book, is due out next spring; she is also co-editing an anthology of writings by Latina scholars on the “politics of translation.” Her studies lead her to consider such questions as “What are the boundaries of Latin America, do they end at the Rio Grande—or at Chicago? Holyoke? Los Angeles?” In researching a concept like alternative globalization—what role do “mild-mannered housewives in Argentina,” for instance, play in such a movement?—she seeks its human face. Appointed the second Horwitz Professor last spring, Alvarez says the Horwitz “is an innovative model for giving to the campus. It not only funds a professorship but also provides support to the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies.” As the Center’s director, she will use the Horwitz funds for such purposes as lecture series, small conferences, and weeklong residencies of Latin American scholars.
G A D A M A H R O U S E
Gada Mahrouse is an Assistant Professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University (Montreal) where she teaches and researches in the areas of critical race studies, cultural studies, social justice pedagogies and transnational feminist and postcolonial theories. Dr. Mahrouse completed her PhD in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto. Motivated by a longstanding interest in social justice, her research seeks to identify and challenge social inequalities. At the centre of her research is an approach to studying the more elusive forms of power in order to make visible the ways in which various systems and processes of domination constitute one another and are reproduced. To this end, she addresses five interrelated themes in her research: race/racialization, gender, trans/nationalism, (neo)colonialisms and imperialisms, and “first-world” subjectivity. In recent years, her interests have focussed on transnational border crossings, especially in “alternative” and well-meaning travel/tourism to the global South. These studies have allowed Dr. Mahrouse to consider how specific emotions are expressed (and mobilized) in relation to certain geopolitical contexts and the socio-political implications of such expressions. She has a forthcoming book with McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled Conflicted Commitments: Race, privilege and power in solidarity activism.
J A I S E N
Jai Sen, an architect by training and earlier an activist on dwelling, labour, and rights-related issues based in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, is now a researcher, writer, and installation architect living in New Delhi. Till recently independent and during 2004-6 a Nehru Fellow, he is now Director of CACIM (India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement), New Delhi, and also of Unnayan, based in Kolkata. He writes, publishes, and creates events on and around the history and dynamics of popular movement in India and on the globalisation of civil movement. He has published widely. Among other things, he has edited, together with Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman, World Social Forum : Challenging Empires (New Delhi : The Viveka Foundation, 2004); ‘Explorations in Open Space : The World Social Forum and Cultures of Politics’, special issue 182 of the International Social Science Journal, together with Chloé Keraghel (UNESCO and Blackwell’s, December 2004); and Are Other Worlds Possible ? Talking New Politics with Mayuri Saini (New Delhi : Zubaan Books, 2005). He has also written ‘A World to Win – But whose world is it, anyway ?’ in Whose World Is It Anyway ? Civil Society, the United Nations, and the Multilateral Future, edited by John W Foster with Anita Anand (Ottawa : United Nations Association of Canada, 1999) and ‘Are other globalisations possible? The World Social Forum as an instrument of global democratisation’, in From a Global Market Place to Political Spaces, edited by Leena Rikkilä and Katarina Sehm Patomäki (NIGD, 2002).