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Note: If you are registered for the 33rd Annual UMBC McNair Research Conference,
please also register for this event if you will be attending!
The UMBC McNair Scholars Program will present the 7th Annual Hill-Robinson McNair Lecture, named in honor of Cynthia M. Hill, Former UMBC Associate Provost & Founding UMBC McNair Director, and Thomas Robinson, PhD., Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and McNair Research Methods Faculty for over 30 years. Here is the link to the flier for the event. All are welcome and encouraged to attend!
Annually, we will highlight a lecturer who is an accomplished UMBC McNair alum or UMBC faculty/staff member who is an alum of a McNair program from another university. This year’s lecturer will be Dr. Yolanda Valencia, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography & Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Alum from Eastern Washington University (EWU) McNair Scholars Program. Click here to read Dr. Valencia’s full biography.
Title of Lecture: “Roots and Resilience Across Borders: Resisting Legal Death in and across the U.S. and Mexico”
Abstract: Capitalism and colonialism are structured through preying upon our relations. Through law and custom, these relational distortions attempt to make life static, to confine, divide, exclude, and extract. But what does the practice of resilience mean to have roots in the U.S. and Mexico, and across their borders? How do roots–resilience and otherwise–inform where we know from, who we are, and the type of scholarship we co-produce? How might such knowledge travel across borders in the co-creation of livable worlds in places not made for us – minoritized people of color? In this lecture, I draw on my ethnographic research in and across the U.S. Mexico border through the lens of my Mexican-American-Indian community’s wisdom and practices of resilience amidst state-sponsored violence in the US, and I reflect upon my experiences in academia. My research involved over two years of fieldwork, including archival research, testimonios, and ongoing transnational ethnography, that allows to more deeply understand how Mexican communities create places of tranquility and livable life in the face of legal, social, and economic violence and death in the U.S. Practices rooted in logics of communality, solidarity, and reciprocity are essential in protecting and expanding our relations and in making livable worlds. This lecture aims to inspire reflections on the lessons we might draw from our own community’s wisdom as we navigate the academy as a place not made for us, and yet a place where we all belong.
The 2025 Hill-Robinson McNair Lecture is co-sponsored by: UMBC McNair Scholars Program, (other sponsors will soon be listed).
For more information & sponsorship opportunities, please contact Dr. Michael A. Hunt, Program Director, UMBC McNair Scholars Program, michaelahunt@umbc.edu.