̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Latin America

̽��ֱ��researcher finding inspiration for the planet’s future in Latin American art

cg605 — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 18:13:32 +0000

Joanna Page has been exploring how work by Latin American artists can help to bring humanity back into a relationship with nature and give us hope for the planet’s future.

Young leaders from UK and Latin America tackle future at Shaping Horizons

plc32 — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 12:18:09 +0000

They will explore how emerging technologies like those underpinning genomics, artificial intelligence, clean energy, and smart cities can be used and regulated to create a more equitable and sustainable global community as well as how to encourage sustainable leadership across disciplines and move beyond traditional diplomacy to address global challenges like climate change and social inequalities.

Shaping Horizons 2019 is a Summit and Action Programme rooted in science, policy, and innovation and will strengthen ties and build relationships between young Future Leaders and Senior Leaders from the UK and Latin America. ̽��ֱ��delegates have been selected from across academia, industry, and government.

Professor David Cardwell, FREng, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Strategy and Planning at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, welcomed delegates at the start of the Summit on behalf of the ̽��ֱ��.

“On every front, the ̽��ֱ�� has been and continues to be engaged with Latin America, including the pleasure of hosting this fantastic summit, Shaping Horizons, where the mission is to empower and promote youth, create networks and to drive change,” Cardwell said.

̽��ֱ��week will culminate with the Future Leaders pitching for prize money to support their own innovative social impact projects they have developed through mentorship and learning during the Summit.

Winners will be supported in further developing and launching their projects through the Action Programme which will follow on from the Summit.

Nigel Baker, OBE MVO, Head of the Latin America Department at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office told delegates that all their ideas would help shape the future.

“Shaping Horizons is absolutely driven by the sense of entrepreneurship, innovation, and ideas of the young people involved. It is going to be fascinating to see the proposals that are coming out,” Baker said.

“There are 24 different teams and there are going to be some spectacular proposals and ideas. Some will win prizes, some will not, but I suspect that all of those ideas are going to be applicable in the future.”

Shaping Horizons is a non-profit initiative organised at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge with the support of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, and the Cambridge Hub of Global Shapers Community, which is an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

Shaping Horizons was founded by Dr Matias Acosta, a UK-Canada Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, and Theo Lundberg, a NanoDTC PhD Student in the Department of Physics.

“Shaping Horizons was founded to promote sustainability using global, cross-disciplinary cooperation as our driving force,” Acosta said.

“We are a team of 40 undergraduates and academics from across more than 20 departments from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge bringing this initiative forward. Our goal is to build a shared and sustainable future between Latin America and the UK.

"We will be providing more than £30,000 in support for cooperative bilateral projects and also have designed a continuous mentorship programme to maximize the chance of success of each of the ideas.”

More than 100 future leaders from the UK and Latin America have gathered at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge to discuss the future of work and education in an increasingly global digital era at this year’s Shaping Horizons summit.

Shaping Horizons was founded to promote sustainability using global, cross-disciplinary cooperation as our driving force.

Shaping Horizons founder Dr Matias Acosta

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Opinion: Harsh Republican immigration rhetoric is invigorating Latino voters

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 12:20:32 +0000

Donald Trump has said Mexicans “are bringing drugs, and bringing crime” to the US, while his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls are also talking up hawkish anti-immigration policies as the primary season unfolds.

That they feel confident doing so says something about American Latinos' surprising history of not showing up at the ballot box in big numbers. But based on the data we have, it seems the anti-immigration right may have finally gone too far.

Latinos are the largest ethnic minority group in the US, making up 17.4% of the population, yet the Latino electorate has so far underperformed at the ballot box. ̽��ֱ��Pew Research Centre projects that a record 27.3m Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2016. That’s 4m more than in 2012, but still only about half of the US’s Latino population.

Expanding the size of the electorate through voter registration and naturalisation campaigns is undoubtedly an important step towards augmenting the political influence of the Latino community. But the impact of a larger electorate will be mitigated if half of eligible Latino voters continue to stay home on election day.

At the 2012 election, an alarming 12m eligible Latinos chose not to vote, and the Latino turnout rate dropped from 49.9% in 2008 to 48%. Conversely, 66.6% of African Americans and 64.1% of non-Hispanic whites voted.

While mobilising unlikely voters in Chicago in 2014, I witnessed how misinformation and a lack of understanding of how the government functions fuels public disillusion with the political process, a major reason many voters, not just Latinos, opt to reject the ballot box.

But the viciously anti-immigrant rhetoric promulgated by Republican candidates is forcing Latino voters to pay attention.

Waking up

A 2015 survey of registered Latino voters jointly conducted by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and Latino Decisions found that 43% of respondents felt more interested in this year’s presidential election than in 2012. ̽��ֱ��same survey found that immigration reform, deportations and Barack Obama’s recent interventions via executive actions are the most important issues for 39% of respondents, tied with job creation and the economy – whereas immigration issues ranked only fourth among Latino voters' priorities in 2012.

This doesn’t make good reading for the Republican presidential front-runners, who claim to recognise the importance of the Latino vote to their campaigns but repeatedly alienate voters with their xenophobic rhetoric and unrealistic immigration policies.

On some themes, Donald Trump is in a league of his own: at the start of his campaign in the summer of 2015, he described Mexicans, by far the US’s largest Latino subgroup, as criminals and rapists. But all three candidates have called for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and have promised to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an administrative policy that allows certain undocumented youth the ability to temporarily live and work in the US.

These promises alarm me since I’m a DACA beneficiary. DACA, among other things, made it possible for me to gain employment after graduating from Amherst College and to continue my graduate education. I am currently a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and a future Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua ̽��ֱ�� in China.

If Trump, Cruz or Rubio reach the White House, the other 660,000 beneficiaries and I would return to living under fear of deportation without access to legal employment.

From the ground up

Deporting all 11m of us is not realistic and will hurt the economy. ̽��ֱ��cheap labour of undocumented workers subsidises the standard of living of every American. Undocumented immigrants also pay billions in taxes which help support public programs. ̽��ֱ��Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy that undocumented residents paid an estimated $11.84 billion in state and local taxes in 2012 – and that legalising undocumented people would add $2.2 billion a year to state and local taxes.

Republican candidates know their immigration proposals are unrealistic, but they chose to ignore the facts to score political points with their conservative base.

Fortunately, the American people are on our side. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 65% of US adults and 77% of Latinos favour a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. While I can’t vote, most of my extended family members, my colleagues and my friends can, and they will not vote for a candidate who wants to deport my mother and me.

Cruz and Rubio, both Cuban Americans, are perhaps hoping Latinos will ignore their stance on immigration and support them in the general election by virtue of their last names. But, if nominated, their ethnicity alone will not endear them to Latino voters. In the aforementioned NCLR survey, only 4% of respondents said they would blindly vote for a Latino candidate; 55% of Latinos listed the candidates’ positions as the most important factor influencing their vote.

This will only matter if Latinos vote in numbers that can make a real difference. Raised turnout and greater political representation are not the catalysts for political empowerment, but the products of it. If those who stand up for Latino interests want to sustain political participation in a meaningful way, civic engagement at the grassroots level must be their focus.

If they can be brought to the ballot box in representative numbers, they could dramatically change American politics. But without a sustained grassroots organising effort, a significant number of Latinos will remain political bystanders in the US.

Carlos Adolfo Gonzalez Sierra, ‎Gates Scholar in Latin American Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Carlos Adolfo Gonzalez Sierra (Centre of Latin American Studies) discusses how the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Republican candidates is forcing Latino voters to pay attention.

Darron Birgenheier

Donald Trump in Reno, Nevada

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Until lions write their own history…

amb94 — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:47:35 +0000

Through kimonos, wall hangings, mats, soft sculptures and paintings, artist Deanna Tyson tells her political tales and weaves her social comments through stitched and painted works.

“Textiles, their application, their colours, their very threads and stitches reveal a great deal about the social history of differing cultures,” says Tyson. “Like a spider, I hope to lure the spectator in through a pretty and frivolous web of threads towards a political punch. Many of the pieces employ African wax cloth, the lineage of which is steeped in meaning and metaphor, legacies of colonialism, trade routes and exploitation.”

̽��ֱ��exhibition space in the atrium of the Alison Richard Building (ARB) nestled among the Faculties of English, History, Divinity and Music is creating a reputation as one of Cambridge’s best-kept secrets, and a leading venue for contemporary international art.

Since the building’s opening last year, the ARB’s Public Art Committee has welcomed a series of exhibitions as part of its ‘ART at the ARB’ initiative, including installation, photography, ceramic and textile work. ̽��ֱ��bright open space of the building’s atrium, arranged over three floors, lends itself to large and colourful pieces and offers a flexible approach to displaying three-dimensional works.

̽��ֱ��ARB, home to the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) is not just an elegant space, but also has art running through its veins. Last year award-winning contemporary ceramicist Edmund de Waal embedded his porcelain works into the very ground on which the building stands for his piece, A Local History. ̽��ֱ��three glass-covered, underfoot cabinets, or vitrines, that contain his collections of ceramic fragments echo the meticulous work of archivists at the Centre of African Studies, the Centre of South Asian Studies and Centre of Latin American Studies. ̽��ֱ��thrill of walking over these unmarked cabinets for the first time is well worth a visit.

Deanna Tyson’s exhibition of textile work, ‘Until lions write their own history the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’, will be open until 3 January 2014. Entry is free.

To find out more about ‘ART at the ARB’, and to propose a new exhibition, visit: https://arbart.crassh.cam.ac.uk/

An exhibition of contemporary textile art by Deanna Tyson has opened at the Alison Richard Building in response to the unique materials held there collected from all corners of the globe.

Deanna Tyson

Karnu Warrior

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Event highlights strong links with Brazil

th288 — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:31:36 +0000

̽��ֱ��Rector of Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), Professor Fernando Ferreira Costa, met with the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz this morning, before a day-long seminar involving academics from both institutions.

Unicamp is a research-intensive university located in the state of São Paulo. It is widely recognised as one of the top-ranked Latin American institutions of higher education.

It contributes 17% of the country’s scientific output and produces 10% of Brazil’s PhDs. Through its technology transfer office, Inova Unicamp, it has become the country’s leading university in the production of Intellectual Property.

̽��ֱ��seminar, “Research collaborations: Opportunities, Policy and Practice”, was organised by Cambridge Enterprise in partnership with Inova.

It was funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Prosperity Fund, and coordinated by the International Strategy Office, the Research Strategy Office and the Institute for Manufacturing.

Making his opening remarks, the Vice-Chancellor commented on Cambridge and Unicamp’s shared belief that “research must not only be of the highest quality, but must be for the benefit of society.” He added that “friendship and solidarity are essential” for successful collaboration, and hoped the Rector of Unicamp would feel that “he was very much among friends”.

Professor Costa gave an overview of Unicamp’s activities and said: “I am sure this is the beginning of increasing and real cooperation between our universities.”

Speaking on behalf of the UK government, Professor Sir Adrian Smith, Director General of Knowledge and Innovation at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, declared: “Our aim is to maintain and extend the UK’s position of as one of Brazil’s top partners in science and innovation. We also want the UK to be a gateway for Brazil’s internationalisation.”

After keynote speeches by Dr Jennifer Barnes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy, and Professor Ronaldo Pilli, Unicamp's Provost for Research, the meeting broke up into two parallel sessions to discuss opportunities and challenges for collaborative research in biological sciences and energy.

On Thursday, Professor Costa had the opportunity to visit the School of Clinical Medicine, the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, the Wellcome Trust Stem Cell Institute and the Centre of Latin American Studies.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has a long tradition of engagement with Brazil. As was pointed out by Professor Steve Oliver, one of the panellists on the biological sciences session, the ̽��ֱ�� Herbarium holds samples of plants collected by Charles Darwin during his famous voyage on ̽��ֱ��Beagle.

̽��ֱ��prestigious Simón Bolívar Chair of Latin American Studies, a visiting professorship for distinguished Latin American intellectuals, has been held by notable Brazilians including economist Celso Furtado, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and sociologist José de Souza Martins.

There are currently many existing research collaborations in areas as diverse as infectious diseases, plant biology, animal welfare, renewable energy, cancer studies and stem cell research.

One of the purposes of the seminar –which focused on research in biological sciences and energy—was to explore ways in which these links can be strengthened, and new links developed.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press opened its Brazil branch in 1998. Today, with a head office in São Paulo and an office in Rio de Janeiro, CUP is one of the largest international publishers in this important market.

Brazil is a growing market for English-language teaching and ESOL examinations.

̽��ֱ��U.K. is Brazil’s second largest partner in scientific research. Engagement with Brazil is a key strategic priority for the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge for the coming decades.

Cambridge has agreements with Brazilian funding bodies such as CAPES (Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education) to offer scholarships to Brazilian citizens.

One of the purposes of Unicamp’s delegation is to explore the possibility of sending Unicamp graduate students and post-docs to Cambridge through the mobility scheme Science Without Borders, announced last year by the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff.

̽��ֱ��Rector of Unicamp and Professor Pilli were joined by fellow academics Professor Roberto Lotufo, Professor Rubens Maciel Filho and Professor Gonçalo Pereira.

Pictured are (l-r) Professor Fernando Ferreira Costa, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz and Dr Jennifer Barnes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy

A senior delegation from one of Brazil’s leading Universities visited Cambridge today to explore the potential for further collaboration.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has a long tradition of engagement with Brazil.

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor

NIGEL LUCKHURST

Brazil visit

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Belief and beyond

amb206 — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 06:13:06 +0000

In a BBC Radio 4 interview last month Imran Khan, cricketer and politician, described his family as living their religion - Islam. He went on to make a distinction between living a religion, which he did as a child, and holding a set of beliefs which he does today as a practising Muslim. For much of history, many communities have, like the traditional Pakistani society in which Khan was raised, lived the religion of their families, neighbourhoods or nations: a detailed code of behaviour, learned in early childhood, governed their everyday lives – from food and drink to education and work – and framed their relationships with the wider world.

In many parts of the world religion exerts far less of an influence on people’s lives today than it did in the past. In the UK, for example, a tiny trickle of people turn up each Sunday to worship in the huge parish churches built in mediaeval times in the wool-rich counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Put crudely, materialism has replaced religion at the heart of our existence in the developed world. In 2007 a television documentary brought a group of forest-dwelling Papua New Guineans to the UK. Stunned by the glittering buildings of the City of London, one of the PNG men remarked that the famous spirit house (St Paul’s Cathedral) pointed out to him by the film maker was dwarfed by some of the big banks: this would not be allowed in his village.

Despite a long-term decline in numbers of worshippers and a long period of indifference, religion has once again become a contentious issue and is never far from the headlines. While mainstream religions have lost their appeal, there has been a worldwide rise in the numbers of people embracing charismatic and fundamentalist beliefs. These groups, though a minority, are highly vocal, and better organised and more committed than followers of mainstream religion or non-believers. ̽��ֱ��development of these new strands of religion in the midst of a secularised society has long fascinated Cambridge academic Dr David Lehmann who will give a public talk on the topic of Contemporary revolution in religious life at the Festival of Ideas on Tuesday.

Lehmann has a long and distinguished career in social sciences; he describes himself as part sociologist, part anthropologist, dedicated to ethnography and comparison. He has been doing research on Latin America for 40 years and has travelled there almost every year. His first research was in Chile on land reform in the years before General Pinochet’s military coup which overthrew Salvador Allende, but since the mid-1980s he has concentrated on religion. His research focused first on dissident Latin American Catholics struggling to apply a radical reading of the gospel known as Liberation Theology during the dark days of military rule; later he turned his attention to the dramatic emergence of charismatic Protestantism in Brazil, and then in the late 1990s he shifted his research to a completely different location, and began a study of the revival of strict observance among Israeli Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin.

“Throughout my career studying religion I’ve been interested in people on the ‘outside’ of mainstream society, who are in one way or another going against the current of respectability and safe options,” he said.

Lehmann’s most recent project is on the Brazil-based neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God which now claims to have 8 million followers in 180 countries and is building the ‘Third Temple of Solomon’ in Sao Paolo, modelled on the proportions in the Book of Kings. Its vast façade will be 56 metres high, and faced in stone imported from Jerusalem; it will dwarf the city’s Cathedral and be larger than the iconic statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro.

“ ̽��ֱ��Universal Church’s ambitions know no bounds,” he said. “It has grown on the basis of spectacle, promise and fear: the spectacle is in the sumptuous scale of its temples, designed and located in such a way as to challenge the dominance of the Catholic Church, and also in the visual and oral manipulation of intensity in its meetings. ̽��ֱ��promise is of a comfortable life for those who believe in Jesus while also strengthening belief in themselves. ̽��ֱ��fear is of the devil who can poison their lives and the lives of families, embodied most especially in the witchcraft of indigenous religions. But the Church is also a managerial phenomenon: its leader and founder, Edir Macedo, may not be an unusually charismatic public speaker but he must be a genius at motivating his vast apparatus of pastors and church workers.”

As for the church’s constituency, Lehmann says that in Europe it consists mostly of immigrants, while in Brazil and Africa it is more varied, but the appeal is directed at people emerging from the lower income groups into the middle classes. " ̽��ֱ��church is notable for the sumptuous scale of many of its temples, often in former cinemas and placed in prominent locations designed to rival Catholic churches; a formula combining a spectacular emphasis on a promise of prosperity and on the presence of diabolic forces in people’s lives," he said.

Lehmann’s research into the upsurge of charismatic and fundamentalist movements suggests the great importance of conversion in contemporary religion: this refers either to people who have undergone a crisis conversion from no religion to one of the evangelical or fundamentalist movements, and also to those who, also in the wake of a crisis experience, have returned to the religion of their birth, taking on its values and norms with renewed intensity. This is particular evident among Jews and Muslims – especially Muslims in Europe. Like converts to evangelical Christianity, these ‘returnees’ tend to be people who have not only been non-believing, or non-practicing, but also people who have very little knowledge of religion at all, even of their ‘own’ religious tradition.

“Of course, this is not always the case, but the observation should give pause for thought to those who would abolish religious education in schools and it might even encourage the provision of a high quality religious education,” said Lehmann.

He points out that in Europe we have gone from mere toleration to positive commitment to religious freedom, allowing all religious traditions, and sometimes religions with no tradition, to claim the same exemptions and privileges long accorded, in this country, only to the Church of England. Yet the Church of England and the Catholic Church remain great institutions which, almost uniquely, command the respect of vast sectors who only go to Church, if at all, to be married and buried, and may not have any religious faith. This is important, for religion is a resource for society as a whole. Lehmann concludes, echoing the words of President Kennedy: “Think not what society can do for religion, think what religion can do for society.”

Dr David Lehmann will give his talk Contemporary revolution in religious life at the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge, 5.30-6.30pm on Tuesday (25 October). Free of charge, no need to book. For a full Festival of Ideas programme go to www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas.

In a Festival of Ideas talk for the public this Tuesday, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� academic Dr David Lehmann will discuss the enduring power of fundamentalist strands of religion within an increasingly secular society. His most recent research focuses on the phenomenal rise of the neo-Pentecostal Church in Brazil where a ‘Third Temple of Solomon’ is under construction in Sao Paolo.

Throughout my career studying religion I’ve been interested in people on the ‘outside’ of mainstream society, who are in one way or another going against the current of respectability and safe options.

Dr David Lehmann

Kosuke Arakawa

̽��ֱ��Third Temple of Solomon under construction in Sao Paolo

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