Jeffrey Gould is the Rudy Professor, Department of History at Indiana University, the former director of the IU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and an associate director of the Center for Documentary Research and Practice in the Media School. His work deals with Central American social movements, ethnic conflicts and political violence. His first book analyzed the rise of peasant and labor movements in Somocista Nicaragua. His second book dealt with the development of the myth of mestizaje in Nicaragua and the simultaneous assaults on indigenous communities in central and western Nicaragua. He then coauthored a book on the mobilization and massacre of Indians and peasants in El Salvador. This project derived from a National Endowment for the Humanities collaborative project that he co-directed with Charles Hale and Darío Euraque. That project, which dealt with the problems of ethnic identity and violence in Central America, involved 15 Central American scholars. He also co-directed and co-produced “Scars of Memory: El Salvador, 1932.” (Icarus, 2003), a 53-minute documentary film. In 2011, he finished La Palabra en el Bosque (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2012), a 56-minute film that deals with the impact of Liberation Theology in Morazan, El Salvador and the origins of the civil war. He is currently writing a book and making a film that deal with the rise and decline of the labor movement in El Salvador during the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on Puerto el Triunfo, a shrimp port.

Daniel James is the Mendel Chair in the Department of History at Indiana University. He was educated in the United Kingdom at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has worked at universities in the United Kingdom, Brazil and Argentina. Since 1982 he has taught in the United States–first at Yale, later at Duke University and since 1999 at Indiana. His research has focused on social and labor history of the Southern Cone, in particular Argentina. He has also written extensively on oral history and more recently on photography and the historical archive. He is currently working on a collaborative project with an Argentine colleague Mirta Lobato on the history of the meatpacking community of Berisso.

Salvadoran filmmaker

Although his birth certificate indicates that he was born in Venezuela, he considers himself Salvadoran. He studied biology at the University of El Salvador . He merged his biology studies with theater occupations and camera experiments until the military takeover and subsequent closure of the University of El Salvador forced him to travel to France, where he graduated in philosophy. He establishes his residence in Guatemala but maintains contact with El Salvador where he makes the documentary Alejandro (1994) about another pioneer of Salvadoran cinema, Alejandro Cotto. When peace was signed in El Salvador, he dedicated himself to a rescue process from the Salvadoran cinematographic past.

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

Jyotsna Kapur is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, who is also cross-appointed with Sociology.  Her research and teaching interests include:  Marxist-feminist theory of media arts and culture; The politics of labor, class, race, and sexuality in neoliberalism; contemporary Indian media culture; History and theory of the documentary idea especially its redefinations in contemporary practices and digital culture; Third Cinema; and Global children’s media culture.  She is the author of The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital (2013) and Coining for Capital:  Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (2005); both books pre-occupied with how the neoliberal turn worldwide since the 70s radically transformed the relationship between generations and our consciousness of time. Coming into media studies with a background in theater, Kapur’s current work is on the anxieties and hopes embedded in the transformation of experience into image and vice versa, both as a market-driven feature of everyday life as well as resistance to it.  One sypmtom or artistic device for exressing this, she suggests, is the recurance of Frankenstein as an overarching myth/concept in contemporary arts practice. Kapur teaches courses in Media Arts theory, documentary practices, analysis of visual culture and in the Peace Studies Minor.

Artist and Filmmaker

Heir to the Zoque culture, his work rescues the values of Mesoamerican cultures. He is an activist for the rights of migrants and the Indians of Mexico. He makes documentaries in short films, although his knowledge in video editing is self-taught, and ventures into photojournalism. In commemoration of the 33 years of the eruption of the Chichonal, which changed the life of the Zoque people, he presented a mural in the Art Gallery “Gustavo Alvino Flores” and a canvas for exhibition in Galería Muy, focusing on the history of Nuevo Carmen Tonapac.