Kata Beilin

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Indians had come to recognize that their fate and the fate of amaranth was one and the same.-John N. Cole, Amaranth: From the Past for the Future Tehuacán Valley lies between the neovolcanic mountain ranges that divide it from Oaxaca to the south and Veracruz to the east. The mountains stop the clouds coming from the oceans and, as a result, Tehuac...

Since the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture has been measured by the relation between the chemical input (fertilizers and pesticides) and yield. Other factors, such as deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and the loss of human health, were not part of these calculations. With the advent of genetically modified monocrops...

This paper examines an environmental conflict between Mayan communities and governmental authorities in Mexico’s Yucatan region. Mayan beekeepers attributed severe economic losses in honey production to the expansion of genetically engineered (GE) soy plantations. Beekeeping of Apis mellifera or “European” honey bees for the purposes of honey expor...

The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems, and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the...

Imagining human corporeality [and I would argue, all corporeality] as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.” It makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background, as Val Plumwood would...

In times of climate change, the citizens of Málaga (Spain) must consider how to respond to both the longer droughts and the torrential rain falls that pose serious threats to local agriculture. In this context, the non-profit group Ecoherencia researches and teaches how to use plants that are viewed by society as weeds, but are equipped with variou...

Safe drinking water has become a major bipartisan priority in Wisconsin. Governor Tony Evers has declared 2019 the year of Safe Drinking Water and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has commissioned a taskforce on Water Quality. This inaugural edition of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Issue Brief focuses on the most widespread groundwater c...

Based on multidisciplinary archives as well as fieldwork and interviews, this article focuses on the intertwined nature of movements of resistance by humans and plants struggling against genetically engineered soy monocultures in Argentina, which we provocatively conceptualize as interspecies resistance. Roundup Ready (RR)-soy is genetically engine...

This essay proposes a theoretical framework and some conceptual tools and inter-disciplinary alliances for Iberian environmental cultural studies. We understand this emerging field as an open space for research and debate within an area of encounter among environmental humanities, cultural studies, Iberian studies and other fields. The theoretical...

This essay analyzes and compares two cultures of time in various contexts of the Hispanic World (Spain, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico), reflecting on films (Sleep Dealer, 2008 and Maquilópolis, 2006) as well as on real-world scenarios on the bases of participant ethnographies and interviews. Corporate time (O’Brien, 2007) is the time of a globalizing...

This article analyzes the cultures of the alternative economies that have emerged in Spain after the 2008 crisis, but also as an answer to the ecological crisis and the global warming. After drafting a conceptual map of alternative economies, the essay focuses on their local environmental projects that are considered as nodes of complex systems. Th...

The contributors ask the following questions: • What are the different rhetorical strategies employed by writers, artists, filmmakers, and activists to react to the degradation of life and climate change? • How are urban movements using environmental issues to resist corporate privatization of the commons? • What is the shape of Spanish debates on...

According to Karen Greenberg’s review of Peter Morris’s Guardians,1 the play is “a theatrical version of split-screen cinema” that symbolically reflects what might be called the split-screen syndrome of the American people after 9/11.2 In cinema, “split screen” is a division of the visible into two or more frames that ruptures the illusion of unity...

This article analyses the commentaries on torture published in El País and La Vanguardia during the years 2004–11 in two parallel debates: first, the debate on bullfighting and human/animal relations, as Barcelona was preparing to manifest itself as an 'anti-bullfighting' city (2004) and later whilst debating the final ban on bullfighting (2010–11)...

This article interprets Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces as a political parable of Spanish debates on historical memory through stories of love, parenthood and broken bones, thus commenting on politics through private life stories passed between generations. In this context I argue that the historical moment of unearthing the dead and revealing th...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures, March 1998. Includes bibliographical references.