SUMAK KAWSAY, GOOD LIVING: Visions for Achieving Environmental & Social Justice in Ecuador and the US
9/27/13
YALE UNIVERSITY MAURICE R. GREENBERG CONFERENCE CENTER 393 PROSPECT ST, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
COLLOQUIUM RATIONALE Struggles to achieve social and environmental justice throughout the world make this an opportune time to consider what scholars and activists in the United States and abroad can learn from innovative transformations in human rights, social justice, and environmentalism outlined in the Republic of Ecuador’s National Development Plan (National Plan for Good Living, 2009-2013) and enshrined in Ecuador’s current Constitution. In what ways can Ecuador’s thinking on social and environmental justice help scholars and activists in the US and abroad imagine Good Living? Can Ecuador’s idea of state formation — plurinationalism — operate as an ethical imperative for including historically excluded peoples into public discourse? Lastly, is the United States ready to develop and engage innovative epistemologies and cosmologies to tackle economic, environmental, and social inequality? Motivated by these questions, the Initiative on Race, Gender & Globalization, in collaboration with the Department of African American Studies, the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies and the Program in Ethnicity Race and Migration, organized this colloquium titled “Sumak Kawsay: Visions for Achieving Environmental and Social Justice in Ecuador and the US.” The colloquium organizers use the Quechua concept of Sumak Kawsay, which describes ways of living in harmony within communities, with ourselves and with nature. “Sumak Kawsay,” approximates to but means more than “el Buen Vivir” in Spanish and “the Good Life,” or “Good Living,” in English. We wish to recognize the importance of the epistemological and cosmological contributions of Andean indigenous peoples to the understanding of what can and should constitute “el Buen Vivir” in the constitution of contemporary Ecuador. Following an opening address by René Ramírez, Secretario Nacional Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación and an architect of the National Plan for Good Living, the colloquium is organized as a set of three roundtable conversations. The roundtables will address the following issues: Plurinationalism, Racial and Ethnic Inequality in the Struggle for Social and Environmental Justice, and The Solidarity Economy. The discussants will engage and debate the challenges of developing and implementing transformative agendas to end racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities, and to promote sustainable living while transforming economic life and protecting the environment from further degradation.
COLLOQUIUM PROGRAM SUMAK KAWSAY, GOOD LIVING: VISIONS FOR ACHIEVING ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ECUADOR AND THE US SEPTEMBER 27 YALE UNIVERSITY MAURICE R. GREENBERG CONFERENCE CENTER 393 PROSPECT ST, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT 8:30am - 9:00am Light Breakfast
9:00am - 9:10am Introduction Hazel V. Carby (Professor, Yale University) 9:10am - 9:30am Formal Welcome Ambassador Nathalie Cely Suárez (Ecuador’s Ambassador to the United States) Raúl Velarde (Ecuador’s General Consul of Connecticut) 9:30am - 10:00am Colloquium Address René Ramírez (El Secretario Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación)
10:00am - 11:30am Roundtable 1: Plurinationalism Jhon Antón Sánchez (Professor, Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales) Vesla Weaver (Professor, Yale University) Steve Pitti (Professor, Yale University) Ned Blackhawk (Professor, Yale University)
11:30am - 12:00pm Coffee/Tea 12:00pm - 1:30pm Roundtable 2: Racial and Ethnic Inequality in the Struggle for Social and Environmental Justice David Pellow (Professor, University of Minnesota) Mabel Wilson (Professor, Columbia University) Jhon Antón Sánchez (Professor, Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales)
1:30pm- 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00pm - 4:30pm Roundtable 3: Discussing Solidarity Economies René Ramírez (El Secretario Nacional Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación) Alicia Schmidt Camacho (Professor, Yale University) Michael Denning (Professor, Yale University)
4:30pm - 4:45pm Afternoon Tea
4:45pm - 5:30pm Closing Remarks and Discussion Guillaume Long, (Minister for the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent, Ecuador) David Pellow (Professor, University of Minnesota) René Ramírez (El Secretario Nacional Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación)
SPEAKER BIOS (Alphabetical Order) Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is a Professor of History and American Studies at Yale and was on the faculty from 1999 to 2009 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A graduate of McGill University, he holds graduate degrees in History from UCLA and the University of Washington and is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West (Harvard, 2006), a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to serving in professional associations and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Ethnohistory, Professor Blackhawk has led the establishment of two fellowships, one for American Indian Students to attend the Western History Association’s annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named for Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago, Class of 1910). Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender & Globalization at Yale University. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (Oxford, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent publications include: “Lost (and Found?) in Translation," Small Axe 2009; “¡Mujeres blancas, escuchad! El feminismo negro y los límites de la hermandad,’ Black Feminims, Traficantes de Sueños, Spring 2012; and “Evidence of things not seen,” “The Subject of Archives,” e-misférica (http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/allissues) (Summer 2012). She has two manuscripts in progress, Child of Empire, near completion and Treason Workers: Violators of Tradition and Other Unreasoning Women. Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Sarai Ribicoff Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her scholarship concerns femicide in Ciudad Juárez, transnational migration, border governance, and social movements in the Americas. She is the author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the Mexico– U.S. Borderlands (NYU, 2008), and is currently at work on a second book project entitled, The Carceral Border: Social Violence and Governmentality on the Frontiers of Our America. She serves on the board of Junta for Progressive Action, a community agency serving the Latina/o community of Fair Haven, and is a contributor to local and transnational projects for immigrant and human rights. Nathalie Cely Suárez is Ambassador of Ecuador to the United States. From May 2009 until November 2011, she was Coordinating Minister of Production, Employment and Competitiveness. Ambassador Cely served as Ecuador’s Coordinating Minister of Social Development from March 2007 to April 2009, during which time, she articulated the politics of socio-economic inclusion to integrate training, technical assistance and building opportunities for men and women, improving their quality of life. At the same time, she guaranteed rights for all people, especially for the most vulnerable, by creating assistance and generating minimum skills/competencies through the provision of education, health and quality housing for everyone. An economist, Ambassador Cely served in the private sector from 2002 to 2007. She was president of Edúcate, a foundation that works to better the quality of education through the measuring and personalization of learning by using information and communication technology. She also was president of and directed the strategies and operations of Stratega, a foundation dedicated to promoting the development of sustainable business with the partnership and the innovation of small Ecuadorian businesses in a search for an equal and competitive Ecuador.
Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan Jr Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and the Co-Director of the Initiative on Labor and Culture. Recent essays include, “Fetishism of Debt,” in “Going into Debt: A Multimedia Dossier,” Social Text Periscope,http:// www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/going-into-debt/, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review (Nov-Dec 2010) and “Representing Global Labor,” Social Text (Fall 2007). He is author of Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (Verso, 2004), The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1997), Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (Verso, 1987/1998), Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) and two books in progress, Decolonizing the Ear, and Wageless Life. Guillaume Long is Minister for the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent in Ecuador. He previously served as President of the Board of Evaluation, Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education Council (CEAACES) and as Advisor to the National Secretary of Planning and Development (SENPLADES). Dr. Long holds a Ph.D. in International Politics from the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London and was appointed Professor of the International Relations Program of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSOEcuador. He is also a member of the Academic Board of the Institute of Strategic National Studies. Dr. Long’s academic writings are concerned with the construction of the modern nation-state, integration and conflict, hegemony and counterhegemony in asymmetrical international relations; Ecuadorian foreign policy and in particular the maritime policy of Ecuador. David Pellow is Don Martindale Endowed Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. His areas of interest include Environmental Justice Studies; Racial and Ethnic Inequality; Transnational Social Movements; Qualitative Research Methods; Labor Studies; Immigration. He is working on a study of radical environmental and animal rights movements and their experiences with state repression. His recent authored and co-authored publications include: Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (MIT, 2002); with, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (NYU, 2011); “Environmental Justice Movement Networks,” in JoAnn Carmin and Julian Agyeman (eds). Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices 2011; “Environmental Justice,” with Paul Mohai and J. Timmons Roberts, Annual Review of Environment and Resources: 34 2009; and “The Global Waste Trade and Environmental Justice Struggles” in Handbook on Trade and the Environment, edited by K. P. Gallagher, (Edward Elgar, 2009). Steve Pitti is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. He was raised in Sacramento, California, and received his PhD from Stanford University in 1998, is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (Princeton, 2003) and articles on Chicano history and historiography. He is currently working on two book projects: The World of Céasar Chávez (forthcoming, Yale University Press) and Leaving California: Race from the Golden State (in process). He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, Western History, 20th-century immigration, civil rights, and related subjects. He currently directs the Latina/o History Project, which explores ethnic Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and other Latino histories in the United States, their links and divisions, their diversity, and their cultures and politics.
SPEAKER BIOS (Continued) René Ramírez has been Ecuador’s Secretario Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovació del Ecuador since November 2011. He has also been Minister of Planning and Development of Ecuador (2008-2011), Vice Minister of Planning and Development (2007-2008), Coordinator of the 2007-2010 National Development Plan, and President of the National Council for Modernization, which he closed down in 2007. He has a Masters in Development Economics from the Institute of Social Studies of The Hague, a Masters in Government and Public Affairs from FLACSO-Mexico, and a Postgraduate Degree in Quantitative Methodology from the University of Michigan. He has taught in the Department of Economics of FLACSOEcuador (2006), in the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (1999-2002) and in the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (2002). He has also coordinated the Research Centre “Centro de Investigaciones Sociales del Milenio, CISMIL” (2005-2006) and has worked in the “Sistema Integrado de Indicadores Sociales del Ecuador, SIISE” (1997-2002), a public entity in charge of elaborating social statistics. His research focuses on development, wellbeing, poverty, inequality, happiness and social policy. He is the author of La vida (buena) como riqueza de los pueblos. Hacia una socioecología política del tiempo. IAEN, 2012, Igualmente pobres desigualmente ricos, Ariel-PNUD, 2008, and the co-author of El Rostro oculto del TLC, AbyaYala, 2006, and of Versiones y aversiones del desarrollo, SIISE-Ciudad-Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2002. Jhon Antón Sánchez, Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador; MA in Cultural Sociology from the National University of Colombia; Specialization in Community Development and Social Management from the Technological University of Chocó. Anthropologist at the National University of Colombia. Currently Research Professor and Coordinator of the Field of Legal Pluralism in the School of Constitutionalism and Law (ECYD) at Ecuador’s National Institute for Advanced Studies (IAEN State Graduate University). Invited Professor of Sociology at San Francisco University, Quito. Invited Professor of the courses “Theories of the African Diaspora in the Americas” and “Citizenship and Racism” at FLACSO (Ecuador). Consultant in various capacities for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC), and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He was UNESCO’s Coordinator of Social Sciences for the Andean Region. Expert in Afro-descendance. His research is on peoples and nationalities, collective rights, plurinationalism, multiculturalism, human rights, poverty, and racial discrimination. He has four books and various academic articles on these topics. He is an activist in the Afro-descendance social movement, a founding member of the Condoto and Iró River Basins Community Council, and a partner of the Mojarras Environmental and Cultural Foundation in Chocó. Raúl A. Erazo Velarde is Ecuadorian General Consul of Connecticut.Consul General Raul Erazo emigrated from Guayaquil, Ecuador to the United States in the year 2000. In 2007, he accepted the mission assigned to him by the Honorable President of the Republic of Ecuador, Rafael Correa Delgado, to serve the Ecuadorian Community as the Ecuadorian Consul in Miami, an assignment that he performed with a great sense of solidarity and trust in the government's new vision of service to Ecuadorians living outside of Ecuador. In 2008, he was designated, in accordance to Ministerial Agreement 000169, Minister of the Ecuadorian Foreign Service and appointed as Consul General of Ecuador in Connecticut. This new Consulate was inaugurated in September of 2008 to serve the Ecuadorian
Community of the area of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Consul General Erazo has dedicated himself to strengthening the ties between the community and local authorities. He strives to make service to the community a priority by bringing strong personal involvement and a firm sense of solidarity to his work, in accordance to the Foreign Policy promoted by the present National Government of Ecuador. He is committed, above all, to the development of human values in the citizens he serves, and to cultivating the concept of living the "good life," Sumak Kawsay. Vesla Weaver is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies at Yale University. Weaver is broadly interested in understanding racial inequality in the United States, how state policies shape citizenship, and the political causes and consequences of the growth of the criminal justice system in the United States. Her newest book project with Amy Lerman, Policing Citizenship: America’s Antidemocratic Institutions and the New Civic Underclass, is concerned with the effects of increasing punishment and surveillance in America on democratic inclusion, particularly for the black urban poor. She is also the author of Frontlash: Civil Rights, the Carceral State, and the Transformation of American Politics (under contract with Cambridge), which uncovers a connection between the movement for civil rights and the development of punitive criminal justice. Mabel O. Wilson, George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, is author of Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, (University of California, 2012). She teaches courses in architectural design, architectural theory, and visual cultural studies. Mabel Wilson is both an award winning designer and scholar. Her collaborative design practices (KW: a and Studio AND) have worked on speculative and built projects. The (a)way station, in the collection of SFMoMA, received a design award from ID Magazine and has been exhibited widely. The Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and SF Cameraworks have exhibited her installations. She is currently compiling the rich photographic archive from Negro Building into an experimental exhibit and database as part of the Becoming History Project. Her research on African Cities and modern architecture appeared in the video and photography exhibition Listening There: Stories from Ghana. As the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor at GSAPP, she directs the program for Advanced Architectural Research, co directs the Global Africa Lab, and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies in GSAS.
SPONSORS • • • • •
Initiative on Race, Gender & Globalization The Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program African American Studies Department Initiative on Labor, and Culture