Sofia Vicente-Vidal is a fourth year PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a BA in English from San Diego State University. She will also be a featured speaker at the NMCC’s 2021 Data|Media|Digital Graduate Symposium panel, giving a talk entitled “Networks of World Heritage Management.”
Her current research interests include the anthropology of time and space, examining the different ways tourists and Maya tourist industry workers conceptualize time and how those frameworks affect their construction of personal and social memory. She makes a broader argument that illustrates the continuities of Eurocentric conceptions of time that manifest themselves in the lives of workers living in the municipality of Tinúm in which Chichén Itzá is situated as a symbol of world heritage and Mexican nationalism.
More broadly, her research is focused on the relationships between different stakeholders in the tourist spaces of world heritage designated by the U.N. Specifically, she investigates how Mexican nationalism is contested or reinforced by constructions of race and ethnicity, how varying versions of indigenous identity are constructed in relation to states and coloniality, and how Maya workers in the municipality of Tinúm navigate and exert autonomy within the political economy of the tourist industry.
She is in the New Media and Culture Certificate program because she wants to acquire skills that could help her shape her research and findings into accessible visual forms. This term she is working on creating a visual representation of networks of heritage management.
Recommendations:
- Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown
- “Sonny’s Blues” short story by James Baldwin
- Abby Martin interview with Dr. Gerald Horne — About Professor Horne: He is “chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and is the author of over 20 books on slavery and the Black liberation movement; most recently ‘The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States.’”
- Bad Faith Podcast “A Liberalism of Scolds w/Thomas Frank”
- Tangerine movie by Sean Baker
- Close Up movie by Abbas Kiarostami