About

Katarzyna Olga Beilin is a professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with affiliations to the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies (LACIS) program, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary Mayan literature and culture, including Mayan resistance and relationships with forests, bees, maize, and milpa. She has directed an award-winning documentary titled Maya Land: Listening to the Bees (2022) and is working on a book manuscript titled The Return of the Mayan Moment; A Struggle for the Forests, for which she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2022-23. Her previous work has spanned the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, emphasizing environmental issues, human relations with animals and plants, indigenous epistemologies, alternative economies, and conceptualizations of time and memory. She has contributed to interdisciplinary research in Environmental Humanities, co-editing several volumes and editing the LASA Forum on climate change as a cultural problem. She is available to mentor students working on Mayan culture, environmentally focused Latin American studies, and Iberian Studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• History
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Art history
• Art

Selected publications

• Information Bytes

  2025-02-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter reflects on the culture of the environment and human animal relations in Spanish cultural history in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The author follows the parallelisms between the debates on bullfighting, colonial attitudes towards nature, and the “war against the virus” to trace a slow change in the current cultural paradigm. While modern cultural rethoric pitts humans against the environment, celebrating an individualistic, masculinist capacity to conquer and subdue nature for pleasure and consumption, a new way of thinking that is emerging from the current environmental crisis views humans as a vulnerable part of planetary ecosystems yet capable of transforming them nonetheless.

  PublisherDOI

• Latin American, Caribbean And Iberian Studies

  2023-07-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter illustrates how Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) connects internationalization of its curriculum to the current UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly, the mitigation of the climate change, environmental degradation, and the economic and political inequality in the Luso-Hispanic World. The chapter focuses on the LACIS Lunchtime Lecture Series and the LACIS Interdepartmental Graduate Seminar with their recent special interests area on race and indigeneity, science and technology and the environment. We also briefly outline our program’s origins and evolution within the context of the 20th and 21st century debates regarding development. We explain how our current teaching and programming analyzes and questions the notion of sustainable development in concrete local contexts of Latin America, taking into consideration indigenous peoples’ life practices, values, and knowledge, the destruction of local ecosystems and migration.

  PublisherDOI

• Multispecies Ethnographies in the World of Things (Crematorio and En la orilla by Rafael Chirbes and Óliver Laxe’s O que arde): On the Need to Ecologize Humanities

  2023-01-17 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 9 Multispecies Ethnographies in the World of Things (Crematorio and En la orilla by Rafael Chirbes and Óliver Laxe’s O que arde): On the Need to Ecologize Humanities

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2023-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  9 Multispecies Ethnographies in the World of Things (Crematorio and En la orilla by Rafael Chirbes and Óliver Laxe’s O que arde): On the Need to Ecologize Humanities was published in A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies on page 111.

  PublisherDOI

• Future with a Past: Future Scenarios of Development in Yucatan in ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?

  Humanities · 2022-04-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Since the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture has been measured by the relation between the chemical input (fertilizers and pesticides) and yield. Other factors, such as deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and the loss of human health, were not part of these calculations. With the advent of genetically modified monocrops in the 1990s, GM soy in particular, plantations took over larger surfaces of land, accelerating these negative processes on a previously unknown scale. It has become clear that if this type of agriculture persists, toxic plantations will soon consume the planet. One of the phenomena prompting this awareness in different places of the world was the death of bees. ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?, directed by Adriana Otero and Robín Canul, relates the environmental conflict between GM soy growers in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and Mayan beekeepers. Not long after the arrival of GM soy to Yucatan, the bees began to die. When their honey was rejected by the EU authorities due to contamination with transgenic pollen, Mayan beekeepers realized that not only their bees, but also their water and their bodies were poisoned by GM soy agriculture, while their forests were cut for new plantations. The Maya demanded that the state prohibit the planting of GM soy on their land. ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas? is a character-driven documentary featuring leaders of the Maya beekeepers’ movement, including the recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize 2020, Leydy Pech. Maya Land; Listening to the Bees, my own documentary, reflects on the same environmental conflict and asks what the future would look like if bee health was considered a criterion of sustainable development. A vision of an alternative future emerges in both films through a series of interviews with Mayan beekeepers, scientists, and policy makers; bees are healthy, water is clean, and agriculture incorporates a mixture of ancient techniques and cutting-edge technologies that assist humans in rethinking their relationships with land and plants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multispecies Ethnographies in the World of Things (Crematorio and En la orilla by Rafael Chirbes and Óliver Laxe’s O que arde):

  2022-11-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Municipios en Transición, economías alternativas y prácticas ecocinemáticas en Carrícola, Pueblo en Transición

  Arizona journal of Hispanic cultural studies/Arizona journal of hispanic cultural studies · 2021-01-01

  articleSenior author

  This essay analyzes the ecosocial project carried out by the Valencian town of Carrícola and the documentary Carrícola, Pueblo en Transición (2018) in two main contexts. First, in the context of the transformations initiated by Towns in Transition, an alter-globalization movement that attempts to restructure local economy, society and agriculture to counteract the destructive processes imposed by the logics of capitalism. Second, our essay considers Carrícola in the context of eco-cinematic concepts and practices. As an ecocinematic work, Carrícola works as a tool for social transformation and a vehicle for a more democratic and more ecologically responsible society. To analyze Carrícola's ecosocial project and the documentary Carrícola in the double context of the Transition movements and of ecocinema, respectively, helps us to understand the various dimensions of those transformative processes, appreciate their achievements and possibilities, and critically highlight their conflicts and shortcomings.

  PublisherDOI

• From a free gift of nature to a precarious commodity: Bees, pollination services, and industrial agriculture

  Journal of Agrarian Change · 2020-03-25 · 40 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems, and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular, we stress the need to connect growing bee‐related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnopornography

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 14 citations

  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • History

  Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers to the often eroticized observation—for supposedly scientific or academic purposes—of those deemed “other” by the observer. In Roth’s case, he was concerned that the descriptions and images he recorded of the bodily and sexual practices of the Aboriginal people he studied were inappropriate for lay readers who might find them vulgar—or worse, titillating. The editors of this collection focus on what it is that creates the slippage between the pornographic and the scientific. In particular, they attend to the importance of race within the colonially created and maintained worlds of both research—ethnography in particular—and pornography.

  DOI

• Messages from the Underground: Interspecies Memory in Times of the Climate Change

  RACO (Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert) (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya) · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In times of climate change, the citizens of Mlaga (Spain) must consider how to respond to both the longer droughts and the torrential rain falls that pose serious threats to local agriculture.In this context, the non-profit group Ecoherencia researches and teaches how to use plants that are viewed by society as weeds, but are equipped with various nutritional, medicinal, and agroecological properties -they call them Multifunctional Plants (PlaMs)-.The ease with which these plants grow is due to what Ecoherencia calls "soil memory."These weeds may have constituted crops long ago, and their seeds remained and multiplied over the centuries.This paper departs from Ecoherencia's vision to propose and examine the concept of interspecies memories, phenomena of centuries-long interactions between species and ecosystems that generate structures of meaning, flesh, and matter.It is not just human memory of the environment or the biological memory of the species revealed by processes of adaptation, but rather a memory of co-evolution.In particular, the co-evolution of societies and their crops has shaped both cultural and technological development that are materialized in seeds and the seeded soil.Seeds, and also weeds' seeds, are repositories of information about life and agricultural technologies from the past, when the human community faced food shortages.This information may be necessary to solve problems arising in the future of climate change.

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew P. Lyons

  Harvard University

  9 shared

• Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián

  9 shared

• Vio Lence

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  9 shared

• Martha Few

  9 shared

• Rachel O'toole

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  9 shared

• Robyn Wiegman

  9 shared

• Gisela Fosado

  Duke University

  9 shared

• Martha Chaik- Lin

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Romance Languages

  University of Chicago

  1998

Awards & honors

• First Prize for Maya Land: Listening to the Bees (2023)
• Fulbright Fellowship to study Mayan contemporary culture (20…
• PI. Bradshaw-Knight Foundation Grant (2018)
• Choice Outstanding Academic Title for In Search of Alternati…
• Carson Fellowship, Rachel Carson Center for Environment & So…