Funding for Feminist Economies of Knowledge Project

Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Dr. Magalí Rabasa is the recipient of a 2019-21 Graves Award. This competitive award, offered biennially, recognizes excellence in teaching; the funding that accompanies it supports research-related expenses. Dr. Rabasa’s proposed research project, “Feminist Economies of Knowledge in the Americas” will extend her transnational research through an exploration of how the multimodal media produced by feminist actors in recent movements travels and circulates. This investigation and analysis will develop the concept of a feminist economy of knowledge, which refers to networks of knowledge production and reception grounded in ethics of collaboration, open inquiry, non-hierarchical organization, solidarity, and social justice.

The Graves Award will allow Dr. Rabasa to conduct field and archival research over the next two years. Later this year she will travel to Brooklyn, NY to spend time in the Interference Archive, a project dedicated to the cultural production of social movements. In 2021, Dr. Rabasa hopes to take an undergraduate student with her to Mexico City to collect new materials including local, site-specific media and other media found in activist spaces, alternative archives, and libraries. Dr. Rabasa’s research, analysis, and study on this project will ultimately result in two published articles and two conference presentations. In addition, Dr. Rabasa plans to use the materials she collects to curate an exhibit for display on campus during 2021-22, as well as in future courses in Hispanic Studies, Gender Studies, and Latin American Studies.

Since she joined the Department of World Languages & Literatures in fall 2016, Dr. Rabasa has published a manuscript, The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground (2019), and more than six articles (three of which are forthcoming). More about Dr. Rabasa’s teaching and scholarship is available here.

Administered by Pomona College and under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Awards “encourage and reward outstanding accomplishment in actual teaching in the humanities by younger faculty members.” Dr. Rabasa joins a distinguished group of other Lewis & Clark Graves’ awardees, including Bryan Sebok (2018), Kristin Fujie (2014), Rachel Cole (2012), Joel Martinez (2010), Karen Gross (2008), David Campion (2006), Rebecca Copenhaver (2004), and Aaron Beck (2000).