Social Science Research Council

The Cultural Agency in the Americas Project was launched by the Regional Advisory Panel (RAP) for Latin America with support from the Ford Foundation. It was initiated with the objective of promoting dialogue and coordinating research across the hemisphere in the broadly defined field of cultural studies around the themes of language, ethnicity and gender. The project sought to promote new research and integrate ongoing work in the field across a number of increasingly unstable yet stubbornly persistent divides—between the humanities and the social sciences, North American and Latin American scholarship, and the fields of Latin American and American Studies.

Experts from throughout the Americas were invited to write essays that present new research and, at the same time, take stock of key debates in their particular locations and subfields. We also organized a hemisphere-wide call for papers through which the RAP identified and selected eleven additional scholars whose work reflects some of the most interesting and promising trends in the field.

This group came together at the Cultural Agency in the Americas Conference on Language, Ethnicity, Gender and Outlets of Expression, which took place at the Bartolomé de las Casas Center in Cuzco, Peru on January 29-30, 2001. The workshop was chaired by Doris Sommer of Harvard University, who lead the RAP's efforts in this area of scholarship. A selection of revised versions of the works presented at Cuzco was published by Duke University in January 2006.

Other Activities

The Cultural Agency Project also co-sponsored a colloquium at the Institute for Peruvian Studies (IEP) in Lima entitled "Cultural Studies: Perspectives and Debates from the South." The event was chaired by Cecilia Blondet, Director of the IEP, and Carlos Iván DeGregori, Director of the IEP's Anthropology Program, and featured Nelly Richard, Jesus Martin Barbero and Hugo Achugar. Conference participants also took part in a discussion with members of the Yuyachkani Theater Group following a special performance of their most recent production, Santiago, which touched upon issues of ethnicity and language in Andean societies.

On September 5, 2001 the Cultural Agency in the Americas Project hosted a meeting at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association held in Washington, DC. Scholars who had participated in the conference held in Cuzco, Peru gathered to follow up on some of the substantive issues raised during and after the Cuzco conference and to discuss future directions for work in the field.

Finally, the project organized a capstone conference which took place in May 2002 at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, California. The three-day conference brought together experts from throughout the Americas to explore emerging currents of theory and practice that seek to illuminate processes of cultural and social change across the Hemisphere. The conference sought to reflect on innovative scholarship on cultural and social change that calls into question conventional boundaries that have separated the social sciences and humanities, Latin American Studies, Latino Studies and American Studies, and communities of researchers located in North and South America. In so doing, it stimulated productive debates about the kinds of collaborative efforts that should be pursued during the coming years. Click here for a list of participants to the capstone conference.

Several of project participants also participated in a related conference on "Intellectual Agendas and Localities of Knowledge," which focused on the impact that academic globalization, recent reforms in higher education, and the blurring of disciplinary boundaries have had on the work of cultural analysts and critics in the hemisphere and on the institutions in which it is carried out.