(Partner Event) 2025 Hill-Robinson McNair Lecture
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Yolanda Valencia (GES)
Location
University Center : Ballroom
Date & Time
September 18, 2025, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Description
The UMBC McNair Scholars Program will present the 7th Annual Hill-Robinson McNair Lecture, named in honor of Cynthia M. Hill, Former UMBC Associate Provost & Founding UMBC McNair Director, and Thomas Robinson, PhD., Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and McNair Research Methods Faculty for over 30 years.
Capitalism and colonialism are structured through preying upon our relations. Through law and custom, these relational distortions attempt to make life static, to confine, divide, exclude, and extract. But what does the practice of resilience mean to have roots in the U.S. and Mexico, and across their borders? How do roots–resilience and otherwise–inform where we know from, who we are, and the type of scholarship we co-produce? How might such knowledge travel across borders in the co-creation of livable worlds in places not made for us – minoritized people of color? In this lecture, Yolanda Valencia draws on her ethnographic research in and across the U.S. Mexico border through the lens of her Mexican-American-Indian community’s wisdom and practices of resilience amidst state-sponsored violence in the US, and she reflects upon her experiences in academia. Her research involved over two years of fieldwork, including archival research, testimonios, and ongoing transnational ethnography, that allows to more deeply understand how Mexican communities create places of tranquility and livable life in the face of legal, social, and economic violence and death in the U.S. Practices rooted in logics of communality, solidarity, and reciprocity are essential in protecting and expanding our relations and in making livable worlds. This lecture aims to inspire reflections on the lessons we might draw from our own community’s wisdom as we navigate the academy as a place not made for us, and yet a place where we all belong.
Annually, the lecture highlights an accomplished UMBC McNair alum or UMBC faculty/staff member who is an alum of a McNair program from another university. This year’s lecturer will be Dr. Yolanda Valencia, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography & Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Alum from Eastern Washington University (EWU) McNair Scholars Program. Click here to read Dr. Valencia’s full biography.
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Roots and Resilience Across Borders: Resisting Legal Death in and across the U.S. and Mexico
Capitalism and colonialism are structured through preying upon our relations. Through law and custom, these relational distortions attempt to make life static, to confine, divide, exclude, and extract. But what does the practice of resilience mean to have roots in the U.S. and Mexico, and across their borders? How do roots–resilience and otherwise–inform where we know from, who we are, and the type of scholarship we co-produce? How might such knowledge travel across borders in the co-creation of livable worlds in places not made for us – minoritized people of color? In this lecture, Yolanda Valencia draws on her ethnographic research in and across the U.S. Mexico border through the lens of her Mexican-American-Indian community’s wisdom and practices of resilience amidst state-sponsored violence in the US, and she reflects upon her experiences in academia. Her research involved over two years of fieldwork, including archival research, testimonios, and ongoing transnational ethnography, that allows to more deeply understand how Mexican communities create places of tranquility and livable life in the face of legal, social, and economic violence and death in the U.S. Practices rooted in logics of communality, solidarity, and reciprocity are essential in protecting and expanding our relations and in making livable worlds. This lecture aims to inspire reflections on the lessons we might draw from our own community’s wisdom as we navigate the academy as a place not made for us, and yet a place where we all belong.
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