Dr. Kristine Muñoz is Professor in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese and in the Department of Communication Studies. Her ethnographic work began in Colombia with a Fulbright Dissertation grant in 1987 and continues through the present day with a second Fulbright Research and Teaching grant scheduled for Spring, 2022. 

She has pursued issues of how to bring scholarship about Colombian culture into public digital spaces in ways that are accessible and compelling to educated lay publics and Spanish language educators. An ongoing project related to that effort is a website, Medellín after Escobar, intended to re-envision Colombia’s second-largest city through images, essays, oral histories and collaborative projects that show the city’s identity of innovation and industry, in contrast to memories of its violent history of narcotrafficking. This project was constructed through the University of Iowa’s Digital Humanities Studio:  https://medellin.lib.uiowa.edu

The Fulbright project in 2022 will be an ethnographic study, conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Universidad de Antioquia, of how schools in different parts of Medellín, Colombia have responded to a requirement to create a “Peace Course” - La Cátedra de la Paz - as part of the Havana Peace Accords in 2016. The requirement calls on the educational system, historically divided by class into public and private realms, to create a “culture of peace” by way of a course taught to every student in every school, from pre-kindergarten through adult education. How that mandate has been interpreted and enacted will be the focus of the study, and what impact COVID-19 lockdowns and  nationwide strikes that began in May of 2021 have had on conversations about the educational system in Medellín will be part of its scope.