Presenters: Joanne Rappaport, Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is an interdisciplinary scholar originally trained as an anthropologist. Her interests include collaborative and participatory research methodologies, indigenous interpretations of history, and race. Her books include The Politics of Memory (1990), Cumbe Reborn (1994), Intercultural Utopias (2005), The Disappearing Mestizo (2012), and Cowards Don’t Make History, as well two co-authored books: ¿Qué pasaría si la escuela…? (2004) with the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca and Beyond the Lettered City (2012), with Tom Cummins, which received the Bryce Wood Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the Kathleen Singer Kovacs Prize of the Modern Languages Association (MLA). In the past decade she has been studying the origins of participatory action research, resulting in a monograph, Cowards Don’t Make History (2021) and a graphic novel, Historieta Doble (2025); Cowards was awarded the Michael Jimenez Prize of the Colombia Section of LASA. Rappaport served as President of the Latin American Studies Association in 2016-2017.
Abstract: Orlando Fals Borda, one of the pioneers of participatory action research (PAR), collaborated in the early 1970s with the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (ANUC), the Colombian peasant movement, on the Caribbean Coast. In collaboration with ANUC, Fals’ team studied the history of peasant struggles of the early twentieth century with an eye to providing ANUC with possible organizing strategies retrieved from the documentary and oral historical records. These histories were crafted into graphic narratives for the peasant rank and file. This presentation emulates Fals’ methods by narrating the history of PAR in comics, as well as by engaging in a participatory process in which students assume the roles of the comics characters, reading them aloud, followed by a group discussion.