Professor Álvarez-Blanco has been named by Dean Gretchen Hofmeister as be the next Broom Fellow for Public Scholarship. The purpose of the Broom Fellowship is to recognize a Carleton faculty member who contributes importantly to public scholarship, and to provide the resources of time and funding to support that individual in promoting and making more visible the role of public scholarship at Carleton. The Fellow is a member of the Center for Community and Civic Engagement.
Professor Álvarez-Blanco’s commitment to Academic Civic Engagement and Public Scholarship has been deeply informed by her research and teaching practices. In 2010, Professor Alvarez-Blanco co-founded ALCESXXI (International Association of 21st-century Spanish Literature and Film). She has served as organization’s president over the past 12 years. This international association works toward a more critically-engaged model for civic education, for collaborative cultural research and for democratic channels of its dissemination. Palmar Álvarez-Blanco regularly participates in seminars and workshops concerning civic engagement, most recently through the Engaged Faculty Institute through Iowa and Minnesota Campus Compact. Last year, she served as Carleton’s delegate to Project Pericles’s initiative “Building Transformative Texts in Civic Education.” Her current academic civic engagement and digital humanities research projects include “Learning History through Meaningful Conversations with Senior Citizens in Spain,” The Constellation of the Commons, an ongoing multimedia research project on the culture of the Commons in Spain, and “Radio and News” a project for public and critical pedagogy oriented toward creating a conversation between different spheres with the goal of providing meaningful analysis of local issues and invigorating a politically and culturally-engaged community