Description of Presentation: This talk is about how we wove and polished the illustrated storybook An Adventure of Wounaan Children and Many Birds with the biocultural team of the Wounaan National Congress and the Foundation for the Development of Wounaan People. Wounaan are an Indigenous people of Panama and Colombia and as part of Wounaan authorities’ project on people, birds, and sustainability in Panama, we leveraged the publication requirement as political intervention and anti-colonial practice. Over 2.5 years, much of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, we storied Wounaan worlds through the everyday adventures of two Wounaan siblings. The result is print and digital audio-illustrated storybooks originally written in Wounaan language (Wounaan meu), and translated into Spanish and English. The talk will be given by biocultural team member Julie Velásquez Runk and illustrator Frankie Green.
Speaker Bio: Julie Velásquez Runk is an ecologist and an anthropologist with over thirty years of fostering environmental justice through interdisciplinary community-based research and collaboration. She bridges traditional disciplinary boundaries by mixing social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities, and authors and co-authors work for academic and non-academic publics. She holds a dual joint Ph.D. in forestry and environmental studies, anthropology, and economic botany from Yale University and the New York Botanical Garden, a Master’s in resource ecology with a graduate certificate in Latin American studies from Duke University, and a Bachelor’s in biology with a concentration in Latin American studies from Grinnell College.
Speaker Bio: Frankie is an artist in multiple media and a visual communicator. During her senior year in college, she began collaborating with the the biocultural team of the Wounaan National Congress (which included Dr. Velásquez Runk), and the NGO Native Future on the illustrated storybook, An Adventure of Wounaan Children and Many Birds. As illustrator of the storybook, she worked for almost two years with the team to make the text into paintings. Currently, she is the Communications Director of Science for Georgia where she oversees content creation that fits the strategic plan and vision of the organization. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Scientific Illustration from the University of Georgia.
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