teaching - research
From 2000 to 2018, I was professor of Literature, Literary Theory, Semiotics, Communication and Technology, and Photography, at Central University of Venezuela, Prodiseño School of Visual Communication and Design, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Fotográficos [Photographic Studies Research Center], Escuela Nacional de Cine [National Film School], and Roberto Mata Taller de Fotografía [ School of Photography] in Caracas, Venezuela before moving to the United States.
In teaching and research I have combined my studies on Literature and Cultural Studies with my subsequent training as a photographer and with the empirical approach to other visual disciplines, such as Cinema and Design. The challenges that arose from the same teaching practice in such areas, and from my technical, plastic and aesthetic concerns in the field of poetic and photographic creation, have led me to integrate concepts and analysis tools from different disciplines ( Literary Studies, Deconstruction, Semiotics, Visual Studies, Philosophy of the Image, Psychoanalysis, Communication, Media and Technology) in a mixed model of general theory as instrumental to analyze and interpret verbal or visual works; as a conceptual horizon to think about the discipline of study in itself, be it literature, design, photography or cinema; as a substrate for the conceptualization of research or artistic projects.
My classes and projects have focused on these aspects, and have been tending towards reflection on certain triangulations between Territory, Memory-Imagination and Experience. In this sense, I am interested in exploring how these relationships are manifested in liminal discourses, located on the edge of the conventions of gender or style in their respective verbal and / or visual disciplines, as recent drifts of photography (post-photography and photopoetics) and poetry (postpoetry, digital poetry) today. The relationships between poetic practices and transmediality, especially those related to photography and experimental poetry.
My areas of expertise include Visual Semiotics, Art-Based Critical Pedagogies, and Philosophy with an emphasis on photography, poetry, performance, contemporary culture, digital media, memory, and Latin America. Currently, my project "Poetics of migrant memories", supported by the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences of the UCR and the Center for Ideas and Society, explores the role of poetic gestures, photography and digital media in the performativity of memory during experiences of forced migration, exile and traumatic violence.
Between 2019 and 2021 I collaborated as author and reviewer of projects in Pedagogías Críticas para la enseñanza de lenguas, a team of researchers and educators dedicated to development of pedagogical methodologies https://pedagogiascriticas.ucr.edu/resources/. Also I took part as a research assistant in an antiracist and multidisciplinary research devoted to social inclusion and linguistic justice: Critical and Inclusive Pedagogies, and Relational Structure for the creation of innovative Spanish teaching materials for Deaf people in higher education on the U.S.-Mexico border (PI’s Claudia Holguín Mendoza, UC Riverside, and María Angélica Castro Caballero, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California) supported by a grant from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS) and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología de México (Conacyt)”.
In addition, during the academic year 2020/2021 I have been able to expand its research framework, organized and moderated discussion events with Latin American artists and scholars, in the multicampus graduate student working group Performance in the Wake of the Political: Latin American Performance as Theorizations of Contemporary Politics, supported by a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Humanities.
Recent publications and events related to the project on “Poetics of Migrant Memories” can be consulted here:
(Special Issue) Performance in the Wake | Cuerpas ante lo politico. Edited by Elena Cardona, Judit R. Palencia Gutiérrez, Gwendolen Pare, and Isabella Vergara. Liminalities. volume 18, issue 3 | 2022
(research project) “On the (In)audible in Art (Part I): Tracing the Sound of lo inaudito in Venezuelan Migrant Women Photographers”. Maria Acosta & Elena Cardona. University of California Humanities Research Institute. 2021/2022
(Article) “Potencia, no poder”. De la fotografía como gesto de resistencia y migración. Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 December 2020, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 153-178(26). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/ejpc_00020_1
(Conference paper) “Migrant Memories. Photopoetics as Gesture of Resistance of Venezuelan Diaspora”. Postmemory and The Contemporary World. 2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference. 24-25 February 2021.
(Talk) Durar o arder. Pruebas de fuego. Agencia poética y política. Organized by Ciudad Laboratorio, Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, Prodiseño. 19 March 2021
(Talk) Potencia, no poder: contar la experiencia. Organized by Ciudad Laboratorio, Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, Prodiseño. 25 May 2020.
(photographic portfolio presentation). Fotografía y poesía: Hacia una poética del silencio. Tarde de Fotografos. 25 de enero 2018. Caracas. 25th January 2018.