In this section you can find information about research projects conducted by CLAS Research Center. In this section we include research projects' abstracts, publications and information about our researchers and CLAS Research Network.  Español

Collaborative Research in Latin America

This project seeks to study the dynamics of collaborative research teams in Latin America, where collaboration and participatory methodologies have a deep history. This will be achieved, on the one hand, by exploring early collaborative teams, such as Orlando Fals Borda's La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social in the 1970s in Colombia, which introduced the methodology of participatory action research. On the other hand, it will examine the dynamics of contemporary collaborative teams in Latin America, through dialogue with them and, eventually, through collaborative ethnographic research.

Project Director

Joanne Rappaport

Professor of Anthropology

Profile

Publications

Books

• Rappaport, Joanne, Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia (Duke, 2005)

Research Network

The first stage of the project involves working through Orlando Fals Borda’s field notes and personal archives. This work is being conducted by Joanne Rappaport (Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown), with doctoral student Oscar Amaya (Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown) as her research assistant, in dialogue with Mónica Moreno, who is working on a dissertation focusing on Fals Borda for her doctoral dissertation in social science at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia; she is currently affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown.

The second, ethnographic, stage of the project will begin 5-6 April, 2013, with a collaborative research conference at Georgetown, in which teams from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States will come together to theorize collaborative research. Pablo Gómez Montanez, a doctoral student in anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, who will be affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown, will enter into this discussion as he writes his dissertation on collaborative research with the Muisca indigenous movement in the environs of Bogotá.

Research Team

Research Assistants

• Oscar Amaya, doctoral student in Latin American Literature at Georgetown

Other Participants
• Mónica Moreno, doctoral student in social science at National University of Colombia
• Pablo Gómez Montáñez, doctoral student in anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes

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