María F. Skillset

Hola!

It was really nice to see all of you again and I’m enjoying reading about all of your projects. Below my skillsets. I have a BA in Anthropology and Spanish Literature and professional experience as a Public Programmer/Event Producer. I graduated with a thesis on ethno-education with Indigenous communities in Colombia (Guainía) and a literature project on creative writing (Spanish).  I’ve also worked with feminist collectives and non-profits and currently I’m pursuing a Certificate in Gender and Women’s studies.

Community Engagement/Outreach:
This is what I love the most to do. I love working with communities, specially with those that we would consider vulnerable communities  and I love creating/engaging in new methodological ways to do social research that not just “use” or see community members as “subjects” but rather as co-producers of the knowledge being created. In general, just like a lot to work with people. Thanks to my Anthropology degree I have done social research work using ethnography (of course), focal groups, semi-structured and structured interviews, network-actor analysis, etc. Thanks to my work with feminist collectives I’ve created and implemented many workshops with different actors using art, mainly literature. I’ve created fanzines, engage in theater impro, film discussions, roundtables, social cartographies, etc. In my previous professional role I also acted as a community liaison in very logistical approaches: finding people, asking them to collab in projects, transferring their concerns to other teams, scheduling interviews, following up, etc.  And, because I like to work with people I could also do social media research or outreach BUT this in particular is not my fav. Finally, I think any project needs to actively engage its audience and would love to work on that front: how to render academic digital work accesible to multiple audiences?

Project Management
As I mentioned I was an event producer in my previous professional role and can transfer many of the same skills to keep a project on track. I’ve overseen budgets, tight deadlines, follow up with all the people required to complete a task/project, created timelines and spreadsheets to keep up with everyone’s work, etc. I don’t really love to do this but I’ve come to understand how important logistics are for any successful project.

Research
I think I’m an intermediate researcher, I did a fair amount digging through library catalogs, databases, online repositories and examining voluminous material, I’ve also have a basic knowledge on how to organize bibliographies in Zotero, but need to polish those skills and learn more about how to dig into archives, which I’m super interested in!

Design
Advanced Beginner in Adobe Suite. Would love to shadow a designer or the person in charge of this role. I have basic understanding of HTML and CSS and CMS and could certainly work way more on developing this skills. I’m also super interested in maps, art (textiles & multimedia), curatorial work (I’ve worked in two museums, not in curatorial but definitely have engaged in their content production process), etc. I’ve also worked with Omeka before so would love to explore more on that area.

Translator
Many of us in this class are bi or even trilingual. I think it is an important skill to highlight, not just in terms of the languages we speak but also in the affinity we might have for seeing, understanding and appreciating cultural differences. Also because we live in an academic world dominated by English scholarly discourse. I learned very basic Arabic before, worked with multilingual indigenous communities and took classical greek in college, so although I’m not very savy in languages I really like to work with all the linguistic diversity that a project my encounter.

Programming
I have no knowledge, will love to gain some knowledge, im in the Python class… so it would be fun to learn from the person doing this job. Some years ago I use VS Code for TEI, XML encoding… but it’s lost in my memory.