Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá delivers keynote address at UC Riverside on February 6, 2026.
Professor Pilar Riaño-Alcalá of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice spent the last few months bringing research and community across the Americas. Follow her travels and the topics she presented below.
MemoLab in Turbo, Colombia
Late last year (November 17-22, 2025) more than 45 local and international artists, scholars, activists, and community memory workers from Canada, Colombia, Chile, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda came together to engage in a 5-day MemoLab. The event took place in Turbo, Colombia.
Under the theme of “Embarcarse: Ports, Flows, and Undercurrents of Memory,” the MemoLab invited participants to “embarcarse” [to embark upon]: to listen, recognize, and dialogue with those forces of memory mobilized by dragging, drifting, hiding, and making visible traces, marks, ruins, and scars.
The MemoLab was coordinated by The Transformative Memory International Network (co-led by Dr. Riaño-Alcalá and Dr. Erin Baines) in partnership with Universidad de Antioquia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, MOVICE (Movement of Victims Against State Crimes), Rutas del Conflicto, and Comité 2 de Mayo.
Learn more about the 2025 MemoLab
Interdisciplinary Colloquium Keynote at UC Riverside
On February 6, 2026, Dr. Riaño-Alcalá delivered a keynote address at an interdisciplinary colloquium titled, “From Earthbeings to the Antropo-not-seen: Towards a Politics of Relation,” hosted by the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. The event was held in collaboration with Anthropology, the CHASS–Center for Ideas and Society and Dance, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Organized in conversation with the work of anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena on the tenth anniversary of Earth Beings, the event examined the concept of the “anthropo-not-seen” and its implications for ecology, environmental justice, memory, and decolonial thought.
2025-2026 Darnell Distinguished Lecture in Theory, Ethnography and Activism in Anthropology at Western University
On March 26, 2026, Dr. Riaño-Alcalá delivered the Darnell Distinguished Lecture at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. The lecture was called “Re-membering the Fragmented: Ethnography on the Move and Political Violence.” It conceptualized memory as a reparative and affective practice, with the potential to reignite ordinary life and to re-member what has been dismembered by political violence and dispossession.
