2016: crónicas Workshop

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crónicas is a one-day workshop that will bring journalists and academics to Duke University on Friday, 15 April 2016. This small conference will serve as a launching-pad for these two professional bodies to meet, visualize, and strengthen their roles as intellectuals. The aim is to create a platform for a continuous and sustained collaboration between journalists and academics. The point of orientation––the subject for deliberation––is this simple premise: to forge a public engagement with the Latino and Latina world in the United States. What would an online forum with shared, side-by-side content written by journalists and academics look and read like?

The crónicas participants are: RUSSELL CONTRERAS, Associated Press and President of UNITY: Journalists for Diversity; NATHAN OLIVAREZ-GILES, The Wall Street Journal; JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ, Texas State University; NANCY RAQUEL MIRABAL, University of Maryland; CLAUDIA MILIAN, Duke University; and BLANCA TORRES, The Seattle Times.

The workshop will endeavor to have a meaningful conversation and fashion a new practice of narrative inquiry by Latino and Latina intellectuals in the twenty-first century. Think of the many forms of reportage and traditions found in the journalistic and literary crónica (or chronicle), where the narration behind events can take many forms of expression, including essays, recollections, travel writing, memoir, and interviews. It is in this spirit––across disciplines, across angles of vision––that this forum is conceived as crónicas: where journalists + academics meet, a vehicle for reflecting about the cacophony of Latino and Latina experiences through new and dynamic models of discussion. The word “crónica” is doubtlessly a nod to the Latin American genre. But it is also an acknowledgement of U.S. Latino periodicals founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Laredo-based La Crónica, which promoted in-depth coverage of issues affecting Texas Mexicans. Our titular crónicas, in plural form, gear toward a joint articulation by journalists and academics in search of a public form, an unrestricted forum.