Palmar Álvarez-Blanco
Palmar Álvarez-Blanco is a professor in the Spanish department at Carleton College, MN. She is co-founder and general coordinator of the International Association ALCESXXI. Her journey as a scholar engaging the world of arts activism and grassroots movements has deeply informed her own research and teaching practices. These experiences have been a source of constant inspiration for the development of civic engaged projects that connect students with social realities and vice versa. Two of her most recent coauthored essays with Dr. Steven L Torres offer a theoretical and a practical reflection on the results of adaptations of the expanded educational and critical pedagogy models in the university curriculum: “Transformative and Emancipatory Research and Education: A Counter-Practice in Research and Teaching” (published in The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2018) and “For a Cultural Politics of Engagement: Combating Information Poverty In and Out of Class”. (In the book Language, Image, Power: Theory and practice of the Luso- Hispanic Cultural Studies, Routlegde, 2021)
Professor Alvarez-Blanco was selected for the Mellon Periclean to Faculty Leadership Program to incorporate civic engagement into the curriculum. The grant through the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership Program in the Humanities supported ‘Radio and News in Spanish,’ an Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) course co-designed and co-taught with community partners Lucy Gonzalez Miron, Tayde Rodriguez, Marlene Rojas and Mar Valdecantos (co-founders and managers of the Northfield community radio program “El Súper Barrio Latino”). The course also counted with the participation of Anthony Harb and the collaboration of Emmanuel Gimeno and Zoë Pelletier as co-designers of the digital portal, open to the use of anyone.
Mar Valdecantos
Mar Valdecantos was born in Madrid in 1969, the same year humankind arrived in the moon. She was born in the winter and now lives in a winter land, in Minnesota since 1998. She likes the winter, the cold, the snow, the storm outside. She started writing when she was 11 years old and hasn´t stopped ever since. She feels she is a story catcher. The stories surround her and sometimes she can catch them and put them in writing while others escape. The whole process is very mysterious. She loves to write and she is also an artist, a translator and a social activist for justice for all. She lives in Minnesota with her two wonderful children, her husband and two dogs. The inspiration for her novels come from her own experiences, the people she knows, the places she has visited and the movies she likes, especially science fiction. Always concerned about the social injustices and well-being of all, she began her personal career in advancing the rights of the underrepresented and voiceless at the Northfield Human Rights Commission in her new city in Minnesota and with others from the Latinx community of Northfield created the Neighbors United/Vecinxs Unidxs action group to fight for the rights and dignity of all.
Emmanuel Gimeno Lodosa
Designer and editor of Creando Estudio Gráfico for more than 20 years, he combines her work life with the accompaniment of processes at the cultural space La Vorágine and of social movements in Santander, the city where she was born and now lives. Autodidactic, he never liked formal education; he is an expert in the fields of editorial, interactive, expository, and corporate design in addition to the field of information and communication technology. For years, he has organized digital training workshops for activists, collectives, local businesses, and educators.
Zoë Pelletier
Zoë Pelletier was born and raised in Boston, MA. She attended public schools there her whole childhood, including Boston Latin School, the first public high school in the nation. It was these experiences in academic institutions where her love for community, the Spanish language, and public education were cultivated. She graduated from Carleton College in the spring of 2021 with a degree in Spanish and Educational Studies. Zoë is now a Spanish teacher in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region, where she strives to teach language with compassion and authentic resources in a loving community for all students.
