When
Join the College of Information Science and postdoc scholar, Maria Torres Martínez for this week's Charla con Café.
The Latin American Studies Students Organization (LASSO) will be offering special homemade treats, including atole, pan de muerto, and café de olla.
Coffee and snacks at 12:30.
The Excavatory Impulse: Unearthing Forensic Sensibilities in Mexico with María Torres Martínez
This presentation approaches the excavatory impulse of Mexico's buscadora collectives as a practice of political aesthetics: an embodied reorganization of perception through which wounded territories, buried histories and material traces of violence become sensible. Focusing on community-led searches in the desert landscapes of Coahuila, northern Mexico, I examine how buscadoras cultivate situated forms of sensory attention through walking, observing, listening and repeatedly scanning the ground, developing an embodied knowledge attuned to surfaces, textures, traces, absences and topographical anomalies. Drawing on political aesthetics, sensory studies and critical approaches to forensic practice, I understand excavation as a process of de-sedimentation that unsettles the temporal and perceptual boundaries through which violence is conventionally apprehended. I argue that these grassroot forensic practices open the ground to an alternative cultural and political sensibility: a forensic aesthetic in which sensing the territory becomes a way of producing knowledge, making absence perceptible and reimagining relations of truth, memory, care and justice.
María Torres Martínez is a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, who works with community-based archives and counter-forensic practices both in Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican border.