Julienne Weegels is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA). Her research interests include violence, (in)security, memory-making, and criminalization. For this ethnographic project, she carried out 31 months of field research with Nicaraguan inmates, through two theater programs in two prisons (a state prison and a police prison), between May 2009 and January 2016. She is particularly interested in the embodied (gendered, classed, and racialized) politics and aesthetics of order-making and protest, including practices of repression and incarceration. Currently, Julienne works on Nicaragua’s political crisis and the development of its hybrid carceral state.

We are happy to have Julienne with us speaking to her background and current work at the intersection of scholarship and political activism. How to look at & engage with patterns of political mobilization with attention to the local? How to navigate being an expert and an activist ? How to engage with the discomfort of being labeled an expert on Nicaragua?  She speaks to how she deals with affect and neutrality in her work  but also to the process of producing knowledge through intimate encounters with other people’s policies. Lastly as a speaker of Why the world needs Anthropologists, Mobilizing the Planet she shares how she will be contributing to the theme as well as her advice and thoughts to those considering to attend. Listen to the episode to hear more about it.

The Human Show - World Podcasts