Crisis Talk: Archaeology and the Narrativization of the Environmental Present

Dr. R. Alexander Hunter, a 2020-21 CISSR Dissertation Fellow and a Lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program at Stanford University recently published “Crisis Talk: Archaeology and the Narrativization of the Environmental Present”. A part of the Vital Topics Forum: “Archaeology, Politics, and Environmental Crisis,” Hunter's article examines how archaeology can provide a unique lens to examine the climate crisis. The discourse around the climate crisis, termed "the Crisis" by Hunter, is both real and constructed. As such, Hunter argues that the scale of the Crisis must be understood between individual and collective experience and global climate shifts. Additionally, the Crisis expands the scale of narrative, where accounts of climate change span local and global contexts. In the context of overlapping global crises, Hunter discusses archaeology's potential to intervene. Building on arguments that favor a localized approach to archaeology, Hunter adds that archaeology must also seek to interrogate narratives and discourses on a larger scale, both temporal and geographic. An archaeological focus on objects central to the Crisis, according to Hunter, can provide a useful link between local experiences and macro narratives that underpin the climate crisis. 

Read the article here.  

Dangerous Winds: Indigenized Approaches to Security of Wind Power in Colombia

2018-19 CISSR Rudolph Fellow Steven Schwartz examines how security arrangements are rapidly shifting amid the steady expansions of renewable energy in Latin America, focusing on the Indigenous area of La Guajira, Colombia and the Wayuu people in the region. Schwartz uncovers how wind energy companies in Colombia rely on Wayuu knowledge, legal norms, and social networks to safeguard themselves in the area, as the region is infamously known to outsiders for lawlessness and illegal practices. Schwartz details the kidnapping of a man named Gustavo, who coordinated the licensing work of a major US renewable energy company (Green Horizon) with plans to develop over 50 wind farms in La Guajira. While certain theories following his disappearance were more outlandish than others, the one constant among the speculation was that Gustavo’s non-Indigenous identity played a role in his kidnapping, and that energy companies often fail to protect their employees with Indigenous guides who know the area. Informed by the example of Gustavo’s kidnapping, Schwartz explores how wind energy companies in Colombia seek to create security structures that utilize indigeneity, rooted in Wayuu knowledge and practices to protect themselves from the dangers that present themselves in events such as Gustavo’s. The windy areas in La Guajira are located within Indigenous land which cannot be privatized, leaving energy companies to devise ways of avoiding attacks against their affiliates without relying on traditional forms of private security, hence why Indigenous practices have been adopted for security operations. Schwartz concludes that these Wayuu lifeways and practices in tandem with modern security measures, are crucial for Colombia’s low-carbon future. 

Read the full article here.

Studying Child Directed Speech

2024-25 CISSR Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor Marisa Casillas tackles the intricacies of Child-Directed Speech (CDS) through an empirical lens, and approaches how future studies conducted can place CDS in the context of cultural diversity in which children’s language transmission takes place. Casillas begins the chapter with an analysis of past CDS studies and describes how the subject has mainly been studied within the field of language development research, often with limited considerations of the direct causes for the basis of language acquisition and production. Despite the term being defined by speech, CDS also includes language, sign language, and nonverbal behaviors that typically accompany verbal communication such as gesturing, movement, and tactile information. Previous research aimed to characterize what distinguished CDS from ADS (adult-directed speech), and found that CDS is a special form of speech with its own features. Most studies that compare the two have focused on prosodic and phonological features –– the former referring to rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech such as elevated pitch, slower speech rate, and exaggerated pitch range, and the latter referring to hyperarticulation and increased vowel space. Initial suggestions believed CDS might be a universal human experience, though the data from previous studies shows there to be a considerable variation in its relevance across different societies, cultures, languages, or in response to the needs of non-typically developing children. Casillas concludes that future CDS studies should shift away from merely viewing children as statistics to extract data from, and instead consider child-directed language as part of a wider collection of culturally transmitted child-rearing behaviors and socialization activities. 

Learn more about the article here.

Post Colonial Reconstruction of the Chicago School in the Philippines

Marco Garrido, Associate Professor and CISSR Board Member, delves into the criticisms of the Institute of Philippine Culture (ICP) and how such criticism lack nuanced approaches to understanding the postcolonial reconstruction of ICP sociology. In the post-independence Philippines, the United States continued to exert a strong influence over Philippine politics, economic interests, and culture, but no sector was as deeply impacted as academia. As a result of this influence, the ICP and the Chicago School became the Philippines most prominent research center, as both produced a great deal of research and trained a substantial number of scholars. Despite its contributions to Philippine society, ICP sociology has been depicted as an American transplant and neocolonial project. Critics viewed it as too material-dependent on the U.S. and deemed it as irrelevant to Philippine society. Garrido argues that scholars did not just import the Chicago School traditions, but reconstructed it in the face of obstacles particular to Philippine society and produced inherently Filipino research traditions. Various waves of criticism stained the legacy of the ICP and images of it are strongly associated with its 1960s values rather than distinguishing the work and research results from the ICP’s reputation. Garrido states that although ICP sociology research tradition has roots in the Chicago School and American sociology practices, it was constructed many times over in the Philippine context, and thus it would be misleading and a disservice to its history to speak of this tradition in terms of continued coloniality. 

Read the full article here.