Ep. 59: The Social Science of Activism and Storytelling w/ Dr. Tania Lizarazo: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Ep. 59: The Social Science of Activism and Storytelling w/ Dr. Tania Lizarazo

Amy Barnes25min

Dr. Ian Anson

00:04

Ian, hello and welcome to retrieving the social sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science scholarship. I'm your host. Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting, speakers and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times, qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative, on retrieving the social sciences. We bring the best of UMBC social science community to you as regular listeners to this podcast assuredly know I am the proud dad of a very wild and inquisitive daughter she'll soon turn three, and so this intro serves as a bit of a self serving birthday shout out, in addition to a lead in to today's feature content, in addition to being a deeply silly little person who loves to Run and jump and do all kinds of kid calisthenics. Our daughter has also quickly turned into an incredibly verbal little human being. Go figure the point being that, in addition to all of the fun that my wife and I have chasing after balls, climbing all over the place and jumping on the bed, we're now an audience to a clever and sometimes quite mystifying storyteller.

Dr. Ian Anson

01:28

Our daughter tells us stories about all kinds of things, from the imaginary unicorn that hangs out in the corner of her bedroom to the silly games that her friends play with her at daycare. Occasionally, we hear stories about another kid's transgressions, who threw a block, who spilled her lunch, who had an accident on the playground. At other times, we get to hear about the class's successes, the soup they cooked together, or the butcher paper that they painted, or the tower that they built. As it turns out, stories are fundamental to human connection, even among our youngest, telling stories is a skill that we learn early on. But how do we succeed in telling stories and when we've heard them? How might we serve as conduits to express them to even wider audiences, and can we preserve the story in that complex translational process? These are some of the questions taken up by Dr Tania Lizarazo, associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages, linguistics and intercultural communication. Intercultural Communication here at UMBC. Dr lizzarazo is also affiliated with the Global Studies program at UMBC, and has played a key role in the development of UMBC s new interdisciplinary program in critical disability studies. On today's episode, I speak with Dr lizarazzo about her forthcoming book project entitled post conflict utopias performing everyday survival in the Colombian Pacific. Dr lizzarazo brings us the stories of black women living in choco Colombia and their experiences organizing through a collective known as cocomacia. Let's listen in as we learn about Colombia cocomacia and the social science of activism and storytelling

Speaker 1

03:02

in today,

Dr. Ian Anson

03:09

Today I am delighted to welcome Dr. Tania Lizarazo to the podcast. Dr. Lizarazo, thank you so much, first of all, for being here today.

Dr. Tania Lizarazo

03:16

Well, thank you for having me.

Dr. Ian Anson

03:19

Awesome. So I want to jump right in. You're talking about your new book today with us, and I'm really excited to delve into this and ask you a bit about the process and a bit about the subject matter as well. And so the new book is about this place in Colombia, right, called Choco. And I looked at the map because I was interested in this. I wanted to know exactly where it was that we were talking about. And so it's essentially bordering Panama to the north, and then it's kind of got this long Pacific coastline, right, kind of on the on the west side of Colombia. And I was really interested in this place, having looked at it on the map and kind of seen it from the sky, right? But I want to know about what it was like to actually go there, and first of all, why you ended up in Choco, of all places, and what was this journey like that led you to choco Colombia?

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