CLACS Blog

Welcome to the CLACS blog. Here you will find information that has to do with Latin America and the Caribbean, New York University, or anything that we at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU (CLACS) find relevant, useful, or just interesting. Here is the link to the official CLACS website. If you would like to submit an article or photograph to this blog, you may email it to us at clacs.nyu[at]gmail.com.

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at New York University is an interdisciplinary teaching, research, and public information program. It is a central hub for Latin America-related research, courses, outreach programs and collaborative efforts across the NYU campus as well as the greater New York City region. CLACS is located in the King Juan Carlos I Center (KJCC) on the south side of Washington Square Park. CLACS sponsors many events, including speaker series and film screenings, and helps get the word out about others. You can find out about these events by checking our events page or signing up for our listserve through NYUHome. Most events are free and open to the public.

CLACS offers multiple MA programs, research funding opportunities for master's and doctoral students and affiliated faculty in all NYU departments and schools, and access to interdisciplinary courses that involve affiliated faculty from over 22 departments. Please visit our website for more information.

Christine Mladic
MA Candidate at CLACS

Thanks to a classmate, I recently discovered this version of Wikipedia in Quechua.

Wikipedia is a user-generated entity accessible by anyone with internet. As such, the multiple groups and dialects of the Quechua language pose a challenge to producing one version of Wikipedia in Quechua. In addition, Quechua has been and is primarily an oral language; it does not have one overarching alphabet or method of translating sounds to written words that is shared by all Quechua speakers. How to produce a unified, collectively created website in Quechua? This project can’t be incredibly inclusive, as participants must both have access to the internet as well as be able to write in Quechua in order to contribute. But on the other hand, there’s potential for it to be a kind of collage, a Quechua crockpot in which dialects meet and mingle. Whether you can read Quechua or not, it’s worth checking out at least to see what it’s like.

Visit the Meta-Wiki for a complete list of languages in which Wikipedia exists.

Christine Mladic
MA Candidate at CLACS

Photo credit: Hillary C. Schiff, Phd Candidate in Neuroscience at NYU

For those who have not attended, you missed a series of compelling lectures that discussed questions about memory and how we deal in the present with traumatic events of the past. Among the many topics raised were school pictures used by contemporary artists, films made by children of the Disappeared in Argentina, and the politics of commemorative dates and public memorials. Definitely check out any CLACS sponsored lecture series in the future.

As a complement to this lecture series, which relies on social sciences to frame debates about dealing with memories, I thought the following two pieces of material from the world of neuroscience might prove interesting. First, this New York Times article talks about a neuroscience project at Brooklyn’s SUNY Downstate Medical Center which studies the altering of traumatic memory in mice and rats. Second, this RadioLab episode about “Memory and Forgetting,” which focuses in part on the research of NYU Neuroscientist Joe LeDoux and the erasing of memories of fear in rats – and humans. Food for thought -- feel free to share opinions.

Christine Mladic
MA Candidate at CLACS