Dara Goldman
Statement
It is an honor to be nominated to serve on LASA’s Executive Committee. LASA has played a significant role in my academic career. Indeed, one of my first conference presentations was at the LASA conference in Guadalajara in 1997. Since then, I have regularly presented at LASA meetings, been a member of several sections, and served on prize committees and in leadership positions in the Sexualities Section. I have witnessed the evolution of LASA over the years as it has grabbled with changes in the profession and faced challenges, including reductions in funding and job market crises.
As a member of the Executive Committee, I would welcome the opportunity to work with colleagues and the LASA Secretariat to ensure that the organization continues to forge new paths of scholarly inquiry and collaboration. I am particularly committed to supporting young scholars and those in non-tenure track positions. I also would like to see LASA continue to mobilize its resources to support our common interests, as it has done previously (i.e., lobbying for the inclusion of Cuban scholars, including moving the conference outside of the U.S. in order to facilitate their participation), without losing the core focus and mission of the organization. In the past, I have had the opportunity to work with community partners and cultural producers in the locations where the conferences have been held, and I would welcome the opportunity to support and even expand such collaborations. In all of these cases, the resources of the association can be leveraged to advance the work of conventional, established scholars while also fostering new opportunities for engagement with scholars, teachers, and cultural producers who do not regularly have the same level of access to academia.
Given my expertise and areas of interests, I am particularly interested in how LASA can provide support to Cuban and Puerto Rican scholars. It is imperative that scholars and students throughout Latin America and the Caribbean remain connected to transnational networks, to disseminate their work along with having access to a broader array of resources, and for specialists to be able to conduct field work and maintain dynamic collaborations with colleagues irrespective of political shifts and in spite of the devastation of natural disasters. At the same time, I am concerned about the role of Spanish departments and language instruction in Latin American Studies, as financial pressures lead to reductions in less commonly taught language instruction and place increased pressure on students to structure programs of study around perceived efficiency and marketability. Not only do basic language courses constitute a foundation of area studies, but reductions in language learning have effects that ripple through multiple aspects of our research and teaching.
Finally, in the current political climate, Latin Americanists are strongly positioned to offer singular insight and perspective. In both academia and in the public sector, there is persistent hand-wringing and angst about increasingly deep divisions and recent political trends, in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East in particular. Latin Americanists thus find ourselves regularly drawing on our expertise to analyze how particular issues such as populism, authoritarianism, corruption, popular movements—among others—have played out in the Latin American context. I look forward to working with colleagues to explore how to showcase this perspective and highlight how knowledge from and about Latin America can inform our understanding of current global shifts and tendencies.