Camilo Huneeus Guzmán, Diego Manya, Monica Nunes Salas are second-year students in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Science. Originally collaborating to create a disaster risk reduction management strategy for the government in Ica, Peru, they found that they worked so well together that they continued that teamwork on a number of projects. The most recent one was overseeing this year’s Sustainable Development in Latin America and Caribbean Conference, funded in part by the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) at the MacMillan Center and its Graduate Student Affiliates Network (GSAN). The MacMillan Center recently sat down with the three of them to talk about their experience with the newly formed network. The following is an edited version of the interview.
How did the CLAIS Graduate Student Affiliates Network help you with the conference?
Monica Nunes Salas: It helped us in a number of ways. We were trying to scale up the conference and GSAN made it so much easier to navigate resources and to reach out to other faculty, centers, and communities at Yale. The guidance of Professor Susan Stokes, chair of the CLAIS Council, and Asia Neupane, CLAIS’ program director, was very instrumental helping us to reach out to prominent speakers outside of Yale.
Diego Manya: We attended the GSAN reception and it allowed us to talk with a lot of people that we’ve never really talked to before about a variety of Latin American issues. We talked with students and faculty from the history department, school of public health, sociology department, and political science department that were working on Latin American issues, but were not aware that the conference existed. It helped us to build awareness for the conference and to make it much more interdisciplinary.
Camilo Huneeus Guzmán: GSAN really helped us figure out the logistics and details of running an international conference. Some of our speakers preferred to give their lectures in their native language. We didn’t want language to be a barrier to learning or engagement with the speakers. One of the great achievements of this conference was that we were able to provide translations in real time so the audience could understand what was being said. We had everyone down an app on their phone or laptop and gave them headsets to use. The translator was actually in Washington, D.C., which was a surprise to everyone, but it really worked well.
What were some of the successes of the conference?
Monica: The theme of this year’s conference was “Silent Leadership,” and we wanted to highlight three things. The first one is professionals from the region who are influencing global trends. The second one is case studies, either successful or challenging, that could help people interested in working on the topic regardless of the region that they’re focusing in to learn from water management, energy, or leadership. And the third one, most importantly, was new leadership. A big success for us is that we were able to fly in four female indigenous leaders from Latin America. One of our main goals for the conference was to have a majority of female speakers because we wanted to provide a platform for them, the “silent leaders.” The voices in the indigenous communities are often male, so we really had to start out by saying we wanted a minimum of half the speakers to be female. GSAN played a role in getting the female speakers here because there were a number unforeseen events that arose and it was helpful to have the guidance it provided.
Diego: I would say that another success will be the conference proceedings. We are working together to create a document that contains the scholarship that was generated by the conference. There was so much that was discussed and so many lessons learned. We’re also hopeful that that the conference will help spark and cement some of the relationships between the people that came to it.