Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Sarah Foss "Here I was born, and here I will die: The Politics of Precarity Amidst Ongoing Environmental Disaster in Guatemala"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms aremeaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

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Sarah Foss is a historian of modern Latin America, with a focus on Central America. She is interested in approaches to history that examine how non-elite people shaped and engaged with large scale phenomena, such as development projects and international diplomacy.

Her research focuses on histories of development, Indigeneity, and international diplomacy in modern Central America. Her first book, On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala (UNC Press, 2022), focuses on the ways that Guatemalan interacted with, and often appropriated Cold War-era development projects. She focuses not only on the actions and motivations of policymakers but also emphasize the ways that Indigenous people actively participated in these processes, creating alternate versions of development and Indigenous citizenship. She has also published chapters in two edited volumes, Latin America and the Global Cold War (UNC Press, 2020) and Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (U. Texas Press, 2020). She also co-edited a special journal issue for the Journal of Social History titled "Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America." Her article which appeared in the issue, "Rumors of Insurgency and Assassination in the Ixcán, Guatemala" won the 2021 Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies.