Elvira Blanco Santini

Visiting Scholar

Elvira Blanco Santini holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University, where she currently works as Managing Editor of the academic journal Revista Hispánica Moderna. Her scholarship combines film and visual studies, political history and theory, studies in popular religion, and ecocriticism, with focus on the Greater Caribbean and, in particular, contemporary Venezuela. Her writing has appeared in A Contracorriente, Ciberletras, and Trópico Absoluto. Her essay “Kaporito, el Guardián de la Montaña (Venezuela, 2021): Ecocinema and Identity” is forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies. Additionally, she teaches undergraduate literature and cultural studies courses in Bard College’s Prison Initiative. As a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, she aims to advance the adaptation of her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Visions of Boundlessness: The Common in Contemporary Venezuelan Cultural Production.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.