Urban Humanities Initiative

TW: immigration trauma & death

This week we are featuring “ÁGUILAS,” a documentary co-directed by UHI Core Faculty member Maite Zubiaurre and the winner of Big Sky Film Festival’s 2021 Mini-Doc Award!

Maite’s co-direction of Aguilas was inspired by her research into forensic empathy, “a newly coined term that stands for consciousness-raising activism and compassion-triggering artistic practices around migrant suffering and migrant death,” which emerged as part of a UHI seminar. Watch the ÁGUILAS trailer at the link in bio, or read more below.

“Along the scorching southern border in Arizona, only an estimated one out of every five missing migrants is ever found. ÁGUILAS is the story of one group of searchers, the Águilas del Desierto. Comprised largely of immigrant Latinos, once a month these volunteers — construction workers, gardeners and domestic laborers by day — set out to recover the missing, reported to them by loved ones often thousands of miles away.”

This week’s must read - “City analog: scavenging sonic archives and urban pedagogy” in the Review of Communication Vol 20(4): (Re)Sounding Pedagogies; authored by UHI Alums Jacqueline Jean Barrios and Kenny Wong (Tokyo ‘17 and Alumni Salon organizers). Learn more at the link in bio!

Pictured: Exhibition of “LA 1992/London 1780: Sounding Out a Crowd” juxtaposing two images of civil unrest from the cities studied; Liner notes students created to accompany the scavenged sounds revealing their inspiration, rationale, and the locations where they were recorded.

In this essay, we describe a pedagogy for teaching and studying literature and cities through the embodiment of an urban sound scavenger. Extending Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ragpicker to poetically assemble disparate urban imaginaries, we explore how two linked teaching projects set in Los Angeles, CA, demonstrate listening bodies coconstituting both literary texts and urban environments.

# analog @ Los Angeles, California

This LA weather has us dreaming of summer - and reflecting back on the wide range of summer research projects produced by the UHI 2019-20 cohort.

eCodex: Los Angeles Trans-Culturation :

Prompted by a call to create a dynamic, digital eCodex, inspired and informed by ancient and contemporary Mesoamerican codices, this project represents a phenomenological approach to the aspects of spatial translation, “space-making” and the construction of identity, via corporeal-temporal-spatial orientation.
The resulting product is entitled eCodex: Los Angeles Trans-Culturation. It is a body of work composed of symbols and stories that reflect the performative placemaking that defines the immigrant and indigenous diaspora as it manifests in Los Angeles’s Westlake / MacArthur Park neighborhood.

Team Members: Cassie Hoeprich, Akana Jayewardene, Tiffany Orozco, Lili Raygoza