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Creative Thought Forum Lectures

Launched in 2017, SAR’s Creative Thought Forum features front-edge thinkers whose work illuminates topics of great public interest to audiences in Santa Fe and beyond. Now in its sixth season, the 2022-2023 Creative Thought Forum focuses on the history and diverse cultures of the Southwest.

2022-2023 Creative Thought Forum

Mellon Lecture
THE EMOTIONAL TOLL OF ANTI-IMMIGRANT AND ANTI-LATINO POLITICAL RHETORIC
Leo Chavez, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Thursday, September 29, 6:00 p.m., at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe

Linda S. Cordell Lecture
FOOTPRINTS AT WHITE SANDS: DISCOVERY, DATING, AND SIGNIFICANCE
Matthew Bennett, Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Bournemouth University, UK; David Bustos, Resource Manager, White Sands National Park; Vance Holliday, Professor of Anthropology and Geosciences, University of Arizona
Thursday, October 6, 2:00 p.m. MDT, online
Click here to view the recording

WOMEN OF THE LOST TERRITORY: NEW MEXICO WOMEN OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Flannery Burke, Associate Professor, Saint Louis University
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Associate Professor of English, Arizona State University
Thursday, January 19, 6:00 p.m., at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe
Register for the event here

Flannery Burke will appear in conversation with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez to discuss women in New Mexico history. They will address some of the usual suspects of New Mexico women’s history—Georgia O’Keeffe, Maria Martinez, Nina Otero-Warren—and how their stories may help us to uncover those of lesser-known women whose life histories have been lost in the triple colonization of New Mexico by Spain, Mexico, and the United States.

Flannery Burke, PhD, is an associate professor at Saint Louis University in the Department of American Studies. Her books include A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s. Burke is committed to sharing the indigenous and Spanish-speaking cultures of the American Southwest widely and incorporating those cultures and their histories into the regional, national, and global stories that scholars tell. Her current book project is a history of how twentieth-century writers in the American West imagined the American East.

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English and an Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Fonseca-Chávez’s research focuses on the contentions and legacies of colonialism in the southwest U.S. and how Chicanx and Indigenous communities navigate and contest violence and power in literary and cultural production. She is currently working on a project that centers the stories of Hispano residents of eastern Arizona and how they understand and communicate their querencia—a word that invokes a desire (querer) to embody one’s individual and communal heritage/inheritance (herencia). In 2020, she co-edited Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland with Levi Romero and Spencer R. Herrera. Querencia was named a finalist for an International Latino Book Award.

Mellon Lecture
THE WAR ON BOTH SIDES
Angela Garcia, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Thursday, February 9, 6:00 p.m. at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe
Register for the event here

This presentation considers the “drug war” from the vantage of two sites—a village in northern New Mexico and a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City. It examines the unorthodox ways families care for addicted relatives and demonstrates how these are inseparable from broader social and political arrangements. In thinking comparatively about these two sites, this talk raises urgent questions about the nature of addiction, violence, care, and commitment.

Angela Garcia, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. Her book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande received the 2012 Victor Turner Prize and a 2010 Pen Center USA Award. The Pastoral Clinic explores the relationship between intergenerational heroin use, poverty, and colonial history in Northern New Mexico.

Special thanks to the Mellon Foundation and the Paloheimo Foundation for their support of this program.

 

2022 Creative Thought Forum

Seeking Justice: Towards a More Equitable America

The 2022 Creative Thought Forum presented a series of webinar-style discussions on the theme of social justice as assessed from multiple social, cultural, economic, and environmental perspectives. Presenters were drawn from the SAR network of leading thinkers in academia and beyond, representing fields as diverse as history, law, anthropology, and Native American studies.

This series was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this event do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Justice, Public Lands, and Indigenous Peoples | C. J. Alvarez, moderator; David Treuer, presenter; Patty Limerick, presenterWatch the recording here

Everyday Violence and Strategies for Its Reduction | Melissa Burch, moderator; John Roman, presenter; Hanna Love, presenterWatch the recording here

Finding Just Solutions to Appropriation of Indigenous Creations | Michael F. Brown, moderator; Trevor Reed, presenter; Madhavi Sunder, presenter; Jane Anderson, presenterWatch the recording here

Climate Change and Environmental Justice | Sayd Randle, moderator; Khalil Shahyd, presenter; Sonal Jessel, presenter | Watch the recording here

The “Crisis of Truth” in Democratic Societies | Drake Bennett, moderator; Sophia Rosenfeld, presenter; Rebecca Solnit, presenter | Watch the recording here

Rethinking Monuments and Memorials | Estevan Rael-Gálvez, moderator; Regina Chen, presenter; Kaitlyn M. Murphy, presenter | Watch the recording here

CTF Sponsor Block