Natalia Guzmán Solano, a former Graduate Student Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, has been awarded an Emerging Voices Fellowship, a new program from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) that supports recent PhDs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Specifically, the Emerging Voices Fellowship seeks to identify and assist a vanguard of scholars whose voices, perspectives and broad visions will strengthen institutions of higher education and humanistic disciplines in the years to come. Solano is one of 45 new Emerging Voices Fellows for 2020.
At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has created much uncertainty and instability in the academic marketplace, the fellowship allows early career scholars to take up one-year positions at select institutions in ACLS’s Research University Consortium beginning in August/September 2020. Solano, who earned a PhD from the Washington University Department of Anthropology in 2020, will spend her fellowship with the University of Minnesota’s Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.
Solano’s dissertation, “Subjectivities of Struggle: Charting Inscriptions of Violence and Refusal on the ‘Cuerpo Territorio’ of Peru’s Defensoras,” explores how defensoras del medio ambiente (women environmental defenders), as social actors located at the capitalism-patriarchy nexus, extend their political participation to a terrain beyond the anti-mining movement that first brought them together. She investigates women’s self-adopted conceptualization of “cuerpo territorio,” a notion which identifies heteropatriarchy as a framework for extractivism by making connections between the exploitation of “natural resources” and the Pachamama. The dissertation focuses on key ideas pertaining to the articulation between the defense of life and gender violence struggles; women’s re-appropriation of territory, conceptualizing territory as corporeal and geospatial; and the construction of new and emergent feminisms from the Global South.
Washington University nominated four recent PhD alumni from the humanities and humanistic social sciences through a process coordinated by the Center for the Humanities.
