2020 Global Research Trips

This year, graduate students from across Global Studies master's programs conducted fieldwork through the Global Perspectives Grant, which is made possible through the generous support of Mr. Dapeng Zhu and Ms. Xiao Liu. Read a few highlights about their experiences abroad below.

Quechua language study in Perú

Jessica F. Cordiglia

Latin American Studies

During my stay in Perú, I took daily in-person Quechua lessons with Professor Luis Alberto Medina, from the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Lima. Our lessons consisted of four hours of review of grammar structures and conversations about the Quechua culture. This experience allowed me to work in a relaxed environment and focus on acquiring new vocabulary while producing the language in a comfortable setting.

Another amazing opportunity I had during my trip was to visit the National Archives in the National Library of Lima. During my visits, I accessed the newspapers archives from 1975 to look for articles about Quechua becoming an official language in Perú. I found very interesting articles and political cartoons, which I am hoping to include in my capstone paper for my master's program.

Finally, I had the honor to meet Dr. Roxana Quispe Collante, the woman who made history in Perú by becoming the first person to write and defend her doctoral thesis fully in Quechua. We got to talk about her thesis, which focuses on the fusion of Andean Catholicism and Cusco syncretism in the work of Andean poet Andrés Alencastre Gutiérrez. It was truly an honor to meet such an inspiring woman who advocates for the Runasimi-Quechua language.

Impact of political unrest on the LGBT community in Colombia

Alan Arroyo-Chavez

Latin American Studies

Over the summer, I interned with the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre's Colombia office, learning and writing about the armed conflict and how companies in particular contributed to the continued displacement of indigenous, Afrocolombian, and peasant-farmer communities. After learning more about the Colombian internal conflict, I began to wonder how the LGBT community was also affected, if at all, by the violence written about and mentioned in the reports I was looking at.

Impact of political unrest on the LGBT community in Colombia

January 23, 2020 | Alan Arroyo-Chavez (Latin American Studies)

"When I would leave the office I would spend time going to different shopping centers and parks searching for Christmas lights with friends and loved ones," he said.

This inspired me to delve into the topic for my Latin American Studies Capstone project and prompted me to look through news articles published about LGBT activists who were threatened by armed groups in the Colombian countryside. By returning to Bogotá, Colombia, I got to sit with my coworkers again and bring my doubts to them: What information is there about how the LGBT community was impacted? With their help, I was able to access various reports published by other organizations and entities, such as the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, detailing specific acts and trends of violence against the LGBT community, along with published theses detailing how community attitudes towards LGBT community contributed to their marginalization in the context of the armed conflict. Everything that I read during the weeks that I was there allowed me to understand how dynamics within Colombian society have allowed LGBT people to experience violence at the hands of armed groups or the communities themselves.

However, I was left with another question: How has the government, especially after the signing of the peace accords in 2016, worked to mend the damages to the LGBT community? From the readings and other sources, I did not find many implementations of policy to protect LGBT people from suffering the same damages they endured throughout the conflict, but I found other ways that the government and Ministry of Education tried to implement more inclusive education about sexuality and gender, such as the Programa de Educación para la Sexualidad y Construcción de Colombia (PESCC). After reading other articles about how families reacted to the use of "gender ideology" in schools, I began to wonder how pushing more programs like PESCC in Colombia would not just diminish prejudices seen within educational institutions, but also throughout Colombian society as a whole, not as a way of just lowering rates of bullying and violence in schools, but also as a way of preventing violence against LGBT people from taking the form that it did during the armed conflict.

I think one of the biggest lessons learned, not through the readings I was given access to, but through the conversations that I had with my coworkers and other loved ones in Bogotá had to do with my position as a non-Colombian person writing about Colombia. While all found the topic incredibly important and interesting, our conversations would lead me to always question what my role as an LGBT Mexican-American Stanford student was in the context of the armed conflict, where my experience had had no intersection with what the LGBT community has experienced in the country. That continues to be the question I struggle with most, but I have learned to continue handling the topic with care, and to acknowledge my distance from the topic itself. Any person researching communities that might not be their own must be able to acknowledge their own positionality in comparison to their subjects.

As one of the M.A. students in Latin American Studies, spending time in Bogotá and having conversations with people from there has expanded my own knowledge on other experiences within Latin America. That allows me to contribute the knowledge I have learned there to the spaces that I inhabit at Stanford, educating people about the issues that are affecting Colombian society.

Abigail standing in front of a local work of graffiti in Irkutsk, Russia.

Expressions of modern Siberian sentiments

Abigail Thompson

Russian, East European and Eurasian studies

My graduate thesis within the CREEES program is centered around expressions of modern Siberian sentiments through local Siberian street art and graffiti. Within my research, I also explore whether it can be said that there is one Siberian “nationalism,” or sentiment, how the periphery (Siberia) currently feels about the center (Moscow), and how these mediums fit into larger artistic tradition.

Expressions of modern Siberian sentiments

May 13, 2020 | Abigail Thompson (Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies)

I was first drawn to these unique forms of Siberian art when I lived in Siberia from 2016 to 2017. During this time, I noticed graffiti or street art almost every day, everywhere. On my way to work, to class, to a friend’s, during the day or at night, new works never ceased to surprise me with their strong sentiment, utter originality, and often glaring beauty. Once I realized this art is little researched and almost completely unknown in the West, much less the larger academic community, I decided to make it the focus of my graduate thesis.

Entirely on the aid of SGS, I conducted my primary source research in Siberia over two weeks in December 2019. I took thousands of photos of graffiti and street art in six Siberian cities: Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, and Novosibirsk. As I searched for and took the photos, I recorded observations regarding where the graffiti was located, its ease of access, its ease of translation and interpretation, and even how local Siberians received me taking the pictures.

My findings surprised me. While I am still drawing conclusions and finalizing the direction of my thesis, I learned that Siberian graffiti was not as nationalistic, nor as subversive, as I thought it would be. Instead, it was often more purely artistic, often (seemingly) only serving aesthetic, rather than protest, objectives. There was also far more graffiti and street art than even I had anticipated, and the nuances behind which cities contained more of which type are surprising and make for an exciting thesis. As a result, my two weeks in Siberia taught me a valuable lesson, probably typical for a first-timer: I didn’t find what I expected, and my research completely changed course after collecting my primary sources.

My trip was the highlight of my graduate study at CREEES. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope to further this research in my future endeavors.

Asian diaspora in Latin America

Christine Logan

Latin American Studies

I had the opportunity to spend my summer in Brazil. At Stanford, I spent time researching Pequeño Seúl, a Koreatown located in Mexico City, which sparked my interest in the Asian diaspora in Latin America. More specifically, I was curious to learn more about the East Asian population in Brazil, particularly in São Paulo.

In São Paulo, I visited the districts of Liberdade and Bom Retiro. Liberdade is a popular tourist destination in São Paulo, and it is well known for being the home of the largest Japanese community outside of Japan. In Liberdade, I was able to go to the Liberdade Street Fair and various restaurants and stores in the neighborhood. While not as touristy as Liberdade, I found Bom Retiro, home to the city’s Korean community, to also be a lively district full of fun clothing stores and cheap eats. In both districts, I enjoyed using the Portuguese I had learned at Stanford and during my time in Rio de Janeiro to talk to residents about these neighborhoods, their lives, and their experiences as Asian Latin Americans.

While researching Pequeño Seúl at Stanford, I looked to newspapers to study different media representations of the neighborhood. In Liberdade and Bom Retiro, I noticed many people recording vlogs as they passed through the neighborhoods. A quick search online led me to a plethora of vlogs about both districts. Watching these vlogs has made me realize the value of YouTube videos and other online media content, and I hope to incorporate them in my research in the future.

One of my favorite memories of this experience was being able to try Korean and Japanese foods with a Brazilian twist. For example, I tried bingsoo, a traditional Korean shaved ice dessert, with maracujá, or passionfruit, a very untraditional topping. Additionally, in Liberdade, I tried a hot filadélfia, an interesting fried sushi, with friends. I think that food is one of the best ways to experience a culture and trying the food in São Paulo was definitely a big part of my trip there.

I am so grateful to the Stanford Global Studies Division and the generous funding I received through the Global Studies Graduate Student Grant for supporting my experience in Brazil. This experience has given me a much better understanding of Portuguese, Brazilian culture, and the Asian diaspora in Brazil.

How are the identities of Mexican American youth shaped through storytelling?

Andrea Flores

Latin American Studies

As a scholar, I engage at the intersection of community-based research and storytelling. Thus, I wanted to explore a space that engages with the same framework, albeit not directly. This past summer, I worked alongside an organization called Yollocalli in Chicago, Illinois that provides Mexican American youth with a space to explore their artistic aspirations. I aimed to understand how the identities of Mexican American Chicago youth are shaped through storytelling; after all, we are the stories we tell ourselves. My research question is: How does the creation of stories about the Mexican community affect the identity of the storytellers?

During my time there, I was stunned to learn how there are diverse perspectives on the immigrant community which the youth live day-to-day. There are different political and social interpretations. For me, one of the most interesting moments came when the other youth and I were having a discussion on Latin American politics and one student shared their analysis on Latin American political leaders and corruption. While I shared the same opinion on corruption, their interpretation was completely different than mine, which was interesting to observe. It made me think about how different life experiences lead people to different perspectives, and thus allow us to form different identities.

During my time at Stanford, I studied the intersections of identity, race/ethnicity, colonialism, and inequality. This experience tied all of my academic experiences together. It pushed me to think about how theories of identity, especially transborder identities, are applied in real life, and how storytelling allows students to process their identities. It is this act of performance that allows youth to define who they are.