Penn State professor to talk mourning spaces for the living

Mariana Ortega, an associate professor at Penn State University, will present “Memento Vivere: Shadow Ground, Aesthetic Memory and the Border” at 2:30 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 24, in the Atkins Library Halton Reading Room.

In this presentation, Ortega will discuss the production of spaces of mourning in connection to memory practices, not for the dead but for the living. She will use examples by artist Verónica Cárdenas, who is from the border town of McAllen, Texas. Specifically, Ortega will employ photographs from “Traveling Soles,” a series featuring images of undocumented immigrants, including many Central American children. The Penn State professor notes that aesthetic memory is a way to honor all those immigrants who have become invisible as humans and “hypervisible as criminals.”

Atkins Library will display “Traveling Soles” on the first floor from Monday, Jan. 21, through Monday, Feb. 25.

Ortega, a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University, focuses her research on questions of self, identity and sociality, as well as visual representations of race, gender and sexuality. She is the author of “In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity and the Self.”

The Center for Professional & Applied Ethics, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Latin American Studies Program and the Chancellor’s Diversity Challenge Fund are providing support for these events.