In this first episode on Indigenous Ecologies, IAS postdoctoral fellows Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez Delucchi are in conversation with Indigenous K’iche’ Maya scholar and activist Emil’ Keme.

Keme is professor in the English Department at Emory University, Atlanta. His teaching and research focus on contemporary Indigenous literatures and social movements, Central American-American literatures and cultures, and postcolonial and subaltern studies theory. He is a co-founding member of the binational Maya anti-colonial collective, Ix’balamquej Junajpu Wunaq’.

He is also the author of the book Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021) that is the starting point for this episode’s conversation. Arigho-Stiles, Suarez and Keme embark on a discussion about the relationship between poetry and resistance, the right to exist for Maya peoples and the struggle to keep their languages alive. They touch upon the idea of plurinationality and the ethos of translating.

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Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez were postdoctoral research fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023.

Arigho-Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous histories and the rural world in Bolivia, focussing on Bolivian Indigenous-campesino movements. She is a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Essex.

Suarez Delucchi is a geographer working on natural resource management institutions at different scales in contested environments. Her work seeks to identify, address and challenge the marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements.

Together, they co-edited a special issue of the IAS online review Think Pieces which you can read here: INDIGENOUS ECOLOGIES & ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS - Think Pieces (thinkpieces-review.co.uk)

The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces.

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