CIRSS Seminar: Jorge Rojas-Alvarez

Jorge Rojas-Alvarez, Informatics PhD candidate, will give the talk, "Radio Sutatenza: History and Collective Memory in a Public Library."

Abstract: The documentary exhibition "Radio Sutatenza: A cultural revolution in the Colombian countryside (1947-1994)" opened at the Luis Angel Arango Public Library in Bogotá (Colombia), was a meeting point for researchers, rural leaders, radio enthusiasts, activists, and agricultural improvement organizations. This talk will focus on the narrated history about Radio Sutatenza as the multimedia based literacy program, the particular features of designing a documentary exhibition like this in a public library, and the formation of networks of people who find in the library a place to build a historical memory about this program.

Rojas is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Communications Research at Illinois. His background is in computer science and the history of technology. He has taken part in the design of public history exercises in national libraries in Colombia within topics of media memory of rural literacy programs based in a radio broadcast. In these exercises of public history, the libraries emerge as spaces of dialogue between historical document archives and memories of users. His main pursuit is to find ways and places for co-construction of collective memory where the inquiry of the past empowers communities to imagine diverse futures.