April 14, 2015  2:00 PM –

CLAS/AUSTIN, Stern Room  217

In this talk, Neustadt describes the extraordinary field trips to the Arizona/Mexico border he has been taking with students since 2010.  He discusses the environmental, financial, political and humanitarian costs of the border Wall. He also touches on how the pedagogy of field trips—experiential education—brings down walls that separate professors from students as well as students from other students. Finally, he will talk about the discursive wall that separates “us” from “them” (US citizens from undocumented migrants), a wall that silences the undocumented and obscures the humanitarian crisis on the border from most people’s view.

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Robert A. Neustadt, Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American Studies at Northern Arizona University, has published two books on performance and experimental  art. Since 2010 he has been taking classes on field trips to the U.S. / Mexico border where students experience, first hand, the human, environmental and political dimensions of immigration. He co-produced, Border Songs, a double
cd of music and spoken word about the border and immigration.