EXTREME TIMES THAT LEAD TO SELF-REINVENTION: A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
By Raymond LAUREANO-ORTIZ
The 2020 global challenge to public health has pushed many aspects of the daily experience to extremes. Teaching, research, networking, and more intimate development processes have been evolving at a fast pace. Constant reinvention of everyday activities and the own selves have been inevitable.
Teaching and the Challenge of Not Leaving Any Student Behind
My January-May semester as an Assistant Professor at the campus of a local university in Puerto Rico started with seven assigned courses in history, humanities, and social sciences. By mid-March, the courses had gone online to address the realities of the emerging intense times. Seeking to cater to the diverse needs of the students, those seven courses practically became 21. Each course had three versions that sought to effectively expose students in different circumstances to contents and to gather evidence of progress: one version for those students with limited or no connectivity to the Internet; another one for those that could join the live videoconference class sessions; and a third version geared towards those that could not join the live video sessions, but had cyber connectivity to watch the session recordings. These dynamics led to a point in which the workload was consistently approaching 16 hours per day. The mission was accomplished for the semester, but alternative approaches are still being explored to reach a balance.
Scholarly Networking Goes Virtual: More Opportunities to Converge?
The traditional, annual, in-person converging event of most professional and academic associations was postponed for 2021 and/or was replaced this year by Internet-based alternatives. For example, three of the Caribbean-focused organizations with which I collaborate – Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH), Society for Caribbean Studies @ the UK (SCS-K), and our own Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) – decided to postponed their respective annual conferences – ACH Guadeloupe, SCS-UK Wales, and CSA Guyana – until next year. A fourth one, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), however, decided, within an extremely short period of several weeks and amid some controversies over technology access and economic affordability, to switch the LASA Guadalajara in-person conference for a virtual one during the same 2021 scheduled period.
The number of virtual conferences and webinars have grown significantly since the second quarter of 2020. Although, in general, these virtual options have been welcomed with enthusiasm, some colleagues have already been feeling the overload. On my part, I have been excited to collaborate in the coordination and delivery of some of these events, expanding the Caribbean-focused network of colleagues, research projects, and research centers of which I am aware. In April, for example, I collaborated with the LASA Puerto Rican Studies Section in the organization of two panels on intersectionality, resistance, and activism for LASA’s aforementioned virtual conference. In May, for a webinar series on Caribbean cultural landscapes, slavery, and feminist voices, streamed from Puerto Rico for the European Union-sponsored ConnecCaribbean (or The Connected Worlds: Caribbean, Origin of the Modern World) project (http://conneccaribbean.com), I served in the team of moderators. In June, I was a panelist in the webinar series coordinated by our CSA organization and the US Embassy in Guyana, Caribbean-American Connections, Social Justice, and Shared Dreams. In July, I collaborated with SCS-UK colleagues to hold a webinar on climate change and the Caribbean, participating as one of the moderators for the session featuring Puerto Rican activist and NASA scientist, Edil Sepúlveda. During the same month, I was a presenter at a ConnecCaribbean conference, streamed from Madrid, focusing on historical perspectives about fear and order in Caribbean society; my topic was Puerto Rico during the Cold War in the Greater Caribbean.
The abundant virtual activity has given visibility to both established and emerging, both well-known and to-be-known scholars and centers of knowledge production, in our area of interest, Caribbean Studies. Through the use of the ACH Facebook page (of which I am one of the editors) and other Internet-based means, I have enjoyed pursuing the cross promotion of virtual events by the Caribbean Studies scholars and knowledge clusters, from each of the multiple linguistic Caribbean subregions and from across the rest of the globe. Capturing the diversity of this Caribbean Studies global community is one of the goals of the upcoming CSA peer-reviewed journal being designed by a team of colleagues, in which I am having the pleasure to serve.
The abundant virtual activity has given visibility to both established and emerging, both well-known and to-be-known scholars and centers of knowledge production, in our area of interest, Caribbean Studies. Through the use of the ACH Facebook page (of which I am one of the editors) and other Internet-based means, I have enjoyed pursuing the cross promotion of virtual events by the Caribbean Studies scholars and knowledge clusters, from each of the multiple linguistic Caribbean subregions and from across the rest of the globe. Capturing the diversity of this Caribbean Studies global community is one of the goals of the upcoming CSA peer-reviewed journal being designed by a team of colleagues, in which I am having the pleasure to serve.
Personal Development amid Extreme Times
The current extreme times have brought and will continue to bring challenges and opportunities not only to professional and financial life, but also to personal development, both emotional and physical. Finally, once I fulfilled my commitments at the university during the first semester of the year, I was able to take the time to adjust, reshape, reinvent my personal wellbeing amid these realities. Advice from traditional medicine and alternative medicine and lifestyles have been addressing old and new concerns. A September retreat has been the highlight of my efforts to balance mind and body as new paths are explored for my professional and personal future. We are ready!
Raymond LAUREANO-ORTIZ: A Bio
Raymond LAUREANO-ORTIZ is a Puerto Rico–based historian, engineer, and management consultant. His interests in historical research revolve around Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, economic development, international relations, scientific and technological innovation, the business ecosystem of innovation, and issues of diversity and inclusiveness. His research work has been included in academic publications from Puerto Rico, Haiti, Cuba, Martinique, France, Germany, and Argentina. His PhD dissertation on the history of Puerto Rico’s paradiplomacy (or international relations as a subnational government) in the 80s and 90s received an Honorable Mention for the Caribbean Studies Association’s Best Dissertation Award in 2018.
He is associated as a researcher to the Latin America Center of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies (University of Denver) and the Jesús T. Piñero Library & Social Research Center (Puerto Rico’s Ana G. Méndez University). He is also involved in Caribbean-centered research projects endorsed and sponsored by CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Initiative (in this latter case, the “Connected Worlds: The Caribbean, Origin of the Modern World” or the “ConnecCaribbean” Project).
He is currently part of the Executive Committee of four different organizations: the CSA (Caribbean Studies Association), the ACH (Association of Caribbean Historians), the SCS-UK (UK-based Society for Caribbean Studies), and LASA-PR (the Puerto Rico Section of the Latin American Studies Association), where he is the Secretary.