Latin American History Workshop (LAHW) The Latin American History Workshop is a forum designed to stimulate discussion of primary questions in and novel approaches to Latin American History. The general intellectual aim of the workshop is to encourage the development of wide comparative historical perspectives and the incorporation of methodologies from a variety of scholarly disciplines in the research of advanced University of Chicago graduate students in Latin American History. Presentations have a broad temporal and geographical range, covering topics from early colonial to contemporary Mexico, Central and South America, Spain, and the United States.
At any given time there are more than seventy interdisicplinary workshops in the social sciences and humanities, some permanent and some that convene for several years. In recent years, a number of workshops have addressed Latin American topics. They include: Caribbean Studies; the Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies; Ethnoise! Ethnomusicology; Semiotics: Culture in Context; and Western Mediterranean Culture.
The Workshop on the Anthropology of Latin America (WALA), will be on hiatus during 2008-09 This workshop provides a forum for the presentation, discussion, and critical engagement of anthropological research on Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. We seek to complement a traditional anthropological focus on indigenous populations in the region with a broader focus that includes: (1) the (dis)integration of indigenous peoples within (neo)colonial political economies spanning the local and the global; (2) the lifeways of other groups also subjected to social stratification etched along historically and culturally specific lines of difference/power; and (3) the production of transnational flows involving laborers, popular cultures, commodities, and projects such as "development" or "democracy." Through presentations and discussions on these and other topics, we hope to bring together students and faculty from various disciplinary and (inter)disciplinary perspectives concerned with "Latin America" in order to encourage creative research endeavors in and on the region.