Activating Heritage 2023 – March 6
START YOUR OWN ORAL HISTORY PROJECTS
Panelists:
Liliana Macias is a DACAmented queer Mexican cultural worker, scholar, and educator raised in Chicago. As a scholar she is currently a PhD student in History at UIC, with a BA in Latinx and Latin American Studies with a minor in Women, Gender and Sexuality, and a master’s in Latin American Studies. Her research interest is in gender and sexuality with a focus on queer latinidades of Chicago. As a cultural worker, she has worked in museum education, curation and public engagement while also engaging in contract work to structurally support local cultural institutions. As an educator she lectured in the women, gender, and sexuality department at Northeastern Illinois university, led workshops on oral histories and the archives with various K-12 youth, and shared her knowledge of queer Latinx cultural histories of Chicago for various audiences. In 2020, Liliana published her master’s thesis “Transformismo: A Spatial, Cultural, and Racial Intervention in Chicago’s Queer and Latinx Communities” in the anthology Queer Sites in Global Contexts: Technologies, Spaces, and Otherness. When not enveloped in her work Liliana enjoys writing poems and has been working on a collection of short stories based on her
Abdul Basheer is a current graduate student in the Department of History at UIC. His research interests include Muslim American history, Islam in the West, Islamic intellectual history, modern U.S. religious history, and transnationalism related to religious, cultural, and intellectual exchange. He has worked on projects such as “Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown,” a collaborative digital public history project which traces the history of the northside neighborhood intentionally shaped by multiple forms of displacement, urban renewal, and active resistance, as well as “American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago,” an oral history exhibition at the Chicago History Museum.
Moderator: Mónica Félix
