The Hemispheric Institute on the Americas

About The Hemispheric Institute

The Hemispheric Institute on the Americas (HIA)  is an interdisciplinary group bringing together faculty and graduate students that focus on the study of transnational processes in the American Hemisphere. Our project brings together people and promotes research to challenge the boundaries of disciplinary specialization and culture area studies.  HIA explores the connections throughout the social, cultural, and economic landscape of the Western Hemisphere from an array of perspectives across multiple academic units, to redirect and redefine the study of Latin America form a broadly hemispheric viewpoint.

The premise of HIA is to move beyond both the national security and elite culture paradigms that have served as the foundation for area studies in the past. While retaining an interdisciplinary understanding of Latin America as an autonomous region with its own internal diversities, HIA focuses on the growing importance of such transnational themes as hemispheric flows of people, capital, consuming goods, images, and ideas. We bring Latin American studies into dialogue with theoretical and empirical work that:

  • emphasizes cultural difference
  • focuses attention on racial/ethnic and gender issues
  • highlights both the cultural face and the new social realities of political and economic disparities

HIA seeks to emphasize the voices of those who question and challenge the nation-state and the dominant cultural order from within, and of transnational forces of change that pose a parallel challenge from without. HIA's faculty affiliates are in the UCD Departments and Programs of Anthropology, History, Sociology Spanish, Native American Studies, Political Science, Chicana/o Studies, African and African American Studies, Human and Community Development, Economics, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Environmental Science and Policy, Nutrition, and others.