THIS COURSE IS TAUGHT IN BUENOS AIRES

Social Activism, Memory, and Human Rights in Argentina

What can we learn from Argentina’s late 20th-century crises, its social movements and their struggle for human rights? Who remembers what of traumatic pasts? How do individuals and collectives recall the past and struggle over its meanings? How do they reinvent themselves and new practices in light of a painful past and a desirable future? The class introduces students to late 20th-century Argentinean history, the last military dictatorship, its rationale, its regional context, and its policies and transformations. It also explores the 2001 crisis when, after having been the poster child of the International Monetary Fund for ten years, Argentina’s economy collapsed leaving millions unemployed and below the poverty line. In addition, the class introduces students to the Argentinean collective process of memory. With these historical and theoretical lenses, the class analyses social and cultural organizations that emerged struggling against the dictatorship’s project of “social disciplining”; as well as other movements that surfaced during the democratic transition/consolidation, and circa the 2001 crisis. The class looks at human rights organizations, co-operative housing groups, “recovered factories” and art collectives.

Readings include works by Emilio Crenzel, Ajejandro Grimson, Elizabeth Jelin, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Sutton, and Diana Taylor. Movies by Luis Puenzo, Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein, and Albertina Carri as also part of the class material. (1 unit)