Wednesday, March 14, 2018 | 4:00-5:30 PM | SJRC Common Room
This presentation consists of two parts. First, Hernández will present a talk that draws on their forthcoming journal publication which narrates an embodied and experiential ethnographic approach, one that reimagines ethnography and ethnographic practices, and works to contribute to healing and Indigenous survivance.
Second, Hernández, who is a Society for Visual Anthropology awardee, will conduct a reading of their ethnographic poetry while inviting bees into the space with the help of photo-ethnography. Hernández’s dissertation work is a relational collaboration with bees, among many more-than-human beings, in and with the borderlands of California and Arizona. Thus, bees and the Indigenous lands from where they live and from which they come will be present and honored through both visual and poetic engagements.
Krisha J. Hernández (Mexica/Aztec, Yaqui (Yoeme), & Bisayan), is an Indígena Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Hernández is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, UCSC Graduate Division, UCSC Science and Justice Research Center, and is a Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar. She is a researcher in the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (Indigenous STS) international research and teaching hub lab chaired by Canada’s Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Environment, Dr. Kim TallBear. Her forthcoming dissertation, “Agents of Pollination: Indigenous Bodies & Lives, and U.S. Agriculture Technosciences,” is concerned with Indigeneity and materialisms, (de)colonization and settler colonialism, and collaboration (with more-than-(but including)-human beings) as healing. Hernández researches human-insect relations in food and agricultural systems, more-than-human socialites, foodways, and environmental change in which they employ a critical Indigenous feminist lens toward more-than-human personhood. Hernández has had the privilege of working as an invited guest on Kānaka Maoli land, and currently works and thinks with desert lands and pollinators in the southern ‘borderlands’ of California and Arizona— primarily in relational collaboration with bees and moths.