Calendar
Caroline Tracey: The Theology of Smuggling: A Genealogy of Humanitarianism in the Borderlands
November 3, 2025
This lecture explores theology, colonialism, and activism in the Southwestern U.S. to show how state-sponsored Protestant missions laid the foundation for contemporary humanitarian aid. In the early 1980s, as civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala escalated, migrants began to cross the Southern Arizona desert in increasing numbers. In response, members of the Tucson clergy collaborated with a Chicano legal aid organization to establish the Sanctuary Movement. From 1981 through 1986, sanctuary volunteers, most of them white, middle-class, and church-going, helped smuggle Central Americans across the US-Mexico border and into refuge around the United States. Today, activists of similar backgrounds carry on that work through several organizations that provide direct action to prevent migrant death in the desert Southwest.
As much as it was a novel upwelling of activist goodwill, however, it was also part of a long history of Protestant re-signification of the desert. The Presbyterian Church arrived to Southwestern US in the 1880s, tasked by the federal government with overseeing select tribes as part of Ulysses S. Grant's "Peace Policy." Tucson's Southside Presbyterian Church—the first to declare public sanctuary—had been founded in the early 1900s as a mission to evangelize to the Indigenous Tohono O'odham people. The church's civilizing aims evolved only as encounters with Indigenous, Mexican, and Black inhabitants of the region pushed church authorities to reframe their mission into one of social justice. This lecture examines the contemporary landscape of humanitarianism in the borderlands in light of this history, offering a critical re-thinking of the religious influences that have given way to its current form.
Gareth Doherty: Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design
November 10, 2025
Landscape architecture is at a crossroads. The ability to draw upon interdisciplinary perspectives and generate insights from the combined vantage points of design, environmental studies, and the social sciences puts it in a prime position to address the most pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and social inequality. Its current reliance on digital and technological solutions, however, has increasingly caused landscape architects to lose sight of the ways in which humans actually use spaces. And while landscapes are designed all over the world, the discipline remains inordinately centered on the Global North. Landscape Fieldwork alters that long-standing paradigm through real-life examples that provide tools for practitioners to engage more deeply with multidimensional, diverse landscapes and the communities that create, live in, and use them.
