Dear bohemios. Many thanks!

Thanks to all those who came to support and/or to participate in SIPGO's Bohemians at the Vineyard, bringing your art, your ears, your applause, your food and most importantly... your presence.. Thanks to all those students, staff and faculty who attended. And specially, thanks to those SIPGO representatives who helped put this together (Helade, Pamela, Song, Clara). It was a great experience. Rain could not stop us, and we are very glad you all decided to join us. Also many thanks to Professor Escobar's and Professor Tolliver's thoughtful messages.

For more pictures and some videos please join

SIPGO's facebook group

: http://www.facebook.com/Tinabazan#!/group.php?gid=120799921270817&ref=mf.

If you have any pictures you would like to share with us please feel free to upload them there.

Thanks to all of you this activity was a success and we look forward to the next one.

LASA Congress 2010. Oct 6-9. Toronto, Canada

"By now LASA2010 preparations are in full swing. We invite you to join us in Toronto for the congress from October 6th through October 9th of 2010. Below is important information regarding the congress. We hope you can join us.



Please note the following critical date regarding your participation:



* May 15; Congress pre-registration deadline. To take advantage of the reduced pre-registration fee, click here http://130.49.230.196/Registration2010/renewing/renewingmembers.htm to renew your membership and preregister on line.

Note that LASA does not refund conference preregistration payment if a registrant is unable to attend the Congress. Please finalize your plans to attend the Congress before preregistering.



Pre-Congress Program

A Pre-Congress Program will take place on October 6 from 2:00pm – 7:30pm at the Sheraton Toronto. Three workshops and one symposium are open to the public; however the workshops require a one-time registration fee of US$10 to cover refreshments and material preparation. The application deadline is June 7; the non-refundable registration fee is due at the time of registration. Click here for more information and to apply for participation http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/eng/congress/precongress_program.asp.



Childcare

LASA may be coordinating childcare for children from ages 6 months to 12 years. Services will be provided in the Sheraton Centre Toronto hotel for a fee which will be determined at a later date depending on demand.



If you are interested in using the childcare services, please send an email including the age(s) of the child(ren) to lasacong@pitt.edu by May 31, 2010.


We look forward to seeing you in Toronto.
Best regards, Your LASA Staff"

http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/eng/congress/index.asp

Geographies at risk: September 23-24, 2010

Professor Musumeci's message to SIP community:


"Dear colleagues,

I'd like to bring to your attention an upcoming, international conference that our colleagues in literature/cultural studies colleagues have organized and that will highlight our academic and interdisciplinary strengths in those areas. The conference is entitles "Geographies of Risk". A general description and program can be found at http://georisk.sip.illinois.edu/
The website will be updated regularly, so you may want to bookmark it and return to it often.

An initiative of this kind reminds us of our intellectual priorities and the interests that bring us together, from different disciplinary and cultural locations.It is also an occasion for our excellent graduate students to get involved, gain valuable experience, and make important contacts. The organizing committee certainly welcomes (and needs!) their help. So if you can participate and are willing to donate a bit of time and effort, please contact any of the organizers. Your ideas or comments are also welcome.

Please mark your calendars for September 23-24, 2010. We are looking forward to it!"


------------------------------------







The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese is pleased to announce the upcoming “Geographies of Risk,” an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to examining the manifold ways in which the Humanities engage with the notion of risk. The conference will invite reflection on the systems of knowledge that have emerged to assess, distribute, and manage risk in different geographical, cultural and historical contexts.

Migrants settling in foreign countries and border patrols, pirates and insurance companies, biologists and ethicists, scientists and environmentalists, merchants and poets, terrorists and governments share a common activity: the assessment and management of risk. Perceptions of risk and risk-taking permeate everyday life, from the public sphere to the most intimate realms of interpersonal contact. Discussions of risk, however, have generally been limited to scientific disciplines, such as probability, game theory and actuarial science. The experts who decide when a risk is worth taking are very seldom the products of departments of literature and culture. The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois proposes a conference dedicated to examining the manifold ways in which the humanities engage with the notion of risk. “Geographies of Risk” will invite reflection on the systems of knowledge that emerged to assess, distribute, and manage risk in different places and historical moments.

The operation of defining generic hazards as risks is fundamentally a struggle over representation, a field of inquiry that the humanities are in a unique position to study. As Ulrich Beck has written, since a given risk may not actually ever occur, risks have a high component of “unreality.” Therefore, risks are constructions and social definitions based on relations of definitions, the result of competing acts of representation. Thus, there are owners of the “means of definition,” mostly scientists and jurists, and citizens who lack “the means of definition” and who depend on the first group to determine when something is or is not a risk. Working at the intersections between power and representation, humanistic inquiry has a stake in asking what constitutes or does not constitute a risk and a risk worth taking.

The focus on geography in this context is related to an understanding of the term as a practical inquiry deeply rooted in the notion of space. Indeed, space is already a representation of risk insofar as it represents (or at least speaks to) border and border crossings, containment and mobility, the limits and conceptualizations of the body, and the location of collective and individual memory. For scholars in the field of colonial Latin American studies, for example, space has represented a useful tool to examine the diverse representations that distinguished the risky encounter between European and native indigenous societies. The global implications of the so-called Discovery of the Americas represented one of the many examples in which geography (as previously described) came to play a critical role in the perception of risk and risk taking. Transoceanic and transnational encounters contributed to the traveling nature of risk and its discursive components, including mapping, picturing, and representation, to name a few.

There is another element that justifies the link between “risk” and “geographies.” Until the present, genealogies of risk have generally taken the societies of the North Atlantic as their starting point, tracing how risk was “tamed” through the invention of discourses such as political economy and science, and practices such as bureaucratic rationalization, statistical analysis and insurance. As the yardstick for modernity, the Protestant, capitalist North has been imagined as a territory in which rational and calculating subjects were able to gauge and dominate risk. As Roberto Dainotto and others have shown, the eighteenth century witnessed the invention of Southern Europe as the irrational, disorderly and often dangerous counterpart to the countries of the North. Elements of this discourse have also operated in the Americas, where Spanish and Portuguese imperial legacies have served as explanation for the region’s lack of properly rationalized societies. Today, investment climates, tourist advisories, and immigration restrictions depend upon the racialization of risk in the global South.

Geographies of Risk” will bring together scholars from across the disciplines for a two day state of the art conference to be held on September 23-24, 2010. The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese will organize complementary activities that will take place in the semester before and during the conference, including a set of colloquia, graduate seminars centered on the notion of “risk,” a faculty and graduate student reading group, and a library exhibit."

GLOBAL STUDIES CONFERENCE

On behalf of the Advisory Board, we would like to inform you of the:

GLOBAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
Pusan National University
Busan, South Korea
21-23 June 2010
http://www.GlobalStudiesConference.com

The Global Studies Conference and the Global Studies Journal are devoted to mapping and interpreting new trends and patterns in globalization. The conference serves as an open forum for exploring globalization from many perspectives in a wide variety of locations. The Global Studies Conference was inaugurated at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2008 and the second Conference was held at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2009.

Along with the general themes of the conference, each year it focuses on a different special topic. This year the special theme is Global Rebalancing: East Asia and 21 Century Globalization. This topic will be explored in great depth as participants immerse themselves into the setting of Busan, South Korea.

This year's conference will feature the following plenary speakers:

- Jan Nederveen Pieterse, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
- Seung Kuk Kim, Pusan National University, Pusan, South Korea
- John M. Hobson, Sheffield University, South Yorkshire, UK
- Li Peilin, President of the Chinese Sociological Association, Beijing, P.R. China
- Min Gong, Deputy Director for Macroeconomic Research, Xiamen University, Fujian Provence, P.R. China
- Shantong Li, Development Research Center of the State Council, Beijing, P.R. China
- Hyun-Chin Lim, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
- Shuziro Yazawa, President of Japanese Sociological Society, Seijo University, Tokyo, Japan
- Arun Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
- Ross Buckley, University New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

As well as this impressive line-up of international plenary speakers, the conference will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the conference call-for-papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the Global Studies Journal. If you are unable to attend the conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this refereed academic journal.

Whether you are a virtual or in-person presenter at this conference, we also encourage you to present on the conference YouTube Channel. Please select the Online Sessions link on the conference website for further details.

The deadline for the next round in the call-for-papers (a title and short abstract) is 13 May 2010. Future deadlines will be announced on the conference website after this date. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of submission. Full details of the conference, including an online proposal submission form, are to be found at the conference website - http://www.GlobalStudiesConference.com .

We look forward to receiving your proposal and hope you will be able to join us in Busan in June 2010.

Yours Sincerely,

Jan Nederveen Pieterse
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
For the Advisory Board, Global Studies Conference and Global Studies Journal

***

If you have any inquiries about this conference, please send them by reply to this email. All emails are answered in person by one of our conference administrators within two working days. G

Nossa!!!! Luso-Brazilian end of the semester party/farewell

I would like to take the opportunity to INVITE you all to come to the Luso Brazilian Association end-of-semester party/farewell party next week, Friday April 30th at 9 p.m.

The event will be at V. Picasso restaurant in Urbana (214 West Main Street Urbana, IL 61801)


PS: My band * Samba Soul will be performing during the event. I personally would love to see you there before you leave for the break!!! Let me know if you want us to reserve a table for you! Send an email to sambasoulband@gmail.com

See you there,
Cheers !!!
Vivian (Felicio)

ÑAWI - New Ecuadorian Music. WORKSHOP & PUBLIC CONCERT

The Ecuadorian Students Association and the Fellowship for Activism and Applied Research at the University of Illinois present:


ÑAWI - New Ecuadorian Music.


WORKSHOP & PUBLIC CONCERT

Friday April 30th, 2010
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum. 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL.

4:00-6:00 Workshop: Introduction to the musical traditions and instruments of the Ecuadorian Andes.

7:30-9:30 Free concert. (Auditorium seating is limited. Museum doors open at 7:00 pm).


ÑAWI is an exciting new musical collaboration joining the talents of outstanding musicians from Ecuador, including singer Mariela Condo, musician and cultural promoter Alex Alvear and multi-instrumentalists Roberto, Rumi and Curi Cachimuel (from the award-winning ensemble Yarina). ÑAWI, which in the Native Kichwa language means "faces" is a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the rich and diverse musical styles from Ecuador. From the ancestral Yumbo to the jovial Bomba and Albazo, from the powerful Churay to the melancholic Pasillo, this unique ensemble will transport you to a place which is still unknown to many and very rich in its musical traditions.

ÑAWI is a fusion of modern styles with a variety of traditional rhythms from the Andes of Ecuador. The ensemble performs original arrangements and songs in both Spanish and Kichwa, the language of several indigenous groups in Ecuador. The members of ÑAWI are indigenous from the Puruha and Otavalo people of the Ecuadorian Andes, and from Quito, Ecuador, Mexico and the U.S.

ÑAWI will offer a WORKSHOP and a CONCERT free and open to the public.

4:00-6:00 pm AFTERNOON WORKSHOP: ÑAWI will offer an introduction to the diverse musical styles from the Andes of Ecuador with live demonstrations of diverse rhythms, cultural traditions and the many instruments used.

7.30 - 9.30 pm EVENING CONCERT: ÑAWI will play a variety of rich and diverse musical styles from Ecuador including Yumbos, Bombas, Albazos, Churays and Pasillos.

PAID FOR BY: SORF, Student Affairs Program Coordinating Council, Spurlock Museum, Student Cultural Programming Fee.

Co-sponsors: Department of Anthropology, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, La Casa Cultural Latina, Latina/Latino Studies Program.

Music samples available upon request. For questions contact peguez2@illinois.edu.

Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=508155064&k=56M432W4QT6FXJ1BY1YX2USTRP1156X&oid=114974148520857

Gracias Profesor Irigoyen!

Our most sincere thanks to Professor Javier Irigoyen for taking the time to update, redesign and reconfigure the SIP webpage. It is impeccable and a great reflection of our department's, students' and faculty's hard work and interests . We truly appreciate your effort and time.

Message to all SIP graduate students:

SIPGO also wants to ask all students to help complete all the necessary information on the webpage. The one thing that the SIP webpage is still missing is the academic information of most of the graduate students. If you remember, Prof. Irigoyen sent us an email some time ago with instructions about how to send him our academic information so he could post it in our webpage. We know this is a busy period of the semester, but we really encourage you to spend some time on putting your information together and sending it to Prof. Irigoyen as soon as you can.

Please, when you decide to do so, send an email to Prof. Irigoyen (irigoyen@illinois.edu) following his instructions:

> 1. PERSONAL INFORMATION: It will be much easier for me if I can just cut and paste the
> information directly from the body of your email. In your answer to this message,
> please, include the following categories in the same order. Erase the categories that do
> not apply to you, or, inversely, include a new category if you need it (remember that
> you can only include academic information, and please, proofread):
>
> Contact information:
> Address:
> Telephone:
> Email:
>
> Office hours:
>
> (PHD/MA) Graduate Student in... (FIELD)
>
> Dissertation Title:
>
> Education:
>
> Research Interests:
>
> Publications:
>
> Conference Presentations:
>
> Grants and Awards:
>
> 2. PICTURE (optional) (file in jpg format, attached to the email)

SIPGO'S BOHEMIANS AT THE VINEYARDS: end of the semester reception

Click on images to enlarge.





What? Bohemian night and POTLUCK: OPEN MICROPHONE for music, poetry & arts in general (even performances, photography and plastic arts expositions... you name it!). In the case of plastic arts please let us know in advance.

There will be free wine tasting with ID.


The idea is to have a great time in a fun, stress-free and friendly environment outside of our regular academic environment.


Sleepy Creek Vineyards is located outside Chambana, in the beautiful countryside of Fairmont, Illinois, yet still only 30 minutes away from our SIP department!

Feel free to invite anyone you want: friends, significant others, family, professors, students...

If weather permits, there will even be a marshmallow bonfire by the lake and the vineyard!!!!!!!! Sounds great right!?


C. When? Saturday April 24th

6:00 p.m.— 11:00 p.m.


D. Where? Sleepy Creek Vineyards –Yes, an actual Illinois vineyard!

http://www.sleepycreekvineyards.com/

Please see website for details, pictures and directions.


Click for directions from FLB



E. What to bring?

The main thing is, of course, to bring yourself.
If you want to be an active participant please bring your poems, stories, musical instruments, your voice, performances, and/or any other shape and form of art.


Also, please bring a plate to share (potluck). Ideally, these would be finger food or hors d’ oeuvres. We provide non-alcoholic beverages. Besides the free wine tasting with ID, there will be wine and beer available for purchase.


Hope to see you all there. You will fall in love with this place!

Please do not forget to RSVP the evite you will receive BY APRIL 17. We need to have an idea of how many people will be attending.