In this episode, Brinton Lykes and Brisna Caxaj discuss a long-term feminist participatory action research project supporting Mayan women’s agency in their search for redress for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. They explain the use of Mayan cosmovision, creative arts, dramatic arts, and embodied practices as strategies to both produce and analyze knowledge as the Mayan women developed their own vision of reparations and redress. Brisna Caxaj is a Guatemalan feminist sociologist. She is the Gender Program Director at Impunity Watch Guatemala and the President of the Board of Directors of the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (National Union of Guatemalan Women). She coordinated the team for this PAR project. Brinton Lykes is professor of Community-Cultural Psychology and Co-director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice of Boston College. Brinton has decades of anti-racist, feminist activist scholarship that incorporates creative arts and the epistemologies of Original Peoples with women and children who are trying to re-thread their lives in the wake of racialized and gendered violence and in post genocide transitional justice processes. She is the co-founder of the Boston Women's Fund and the Ignacio Martín-BaróFund for mental health and human rights. See more about the guests and this project at our companion site www.parfemtrailblazers.net
This episode is brought to you by host Patricia Maguire and is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by ZakharValaha from Pixabay
