Claudia Regina Iriarte Cárcamo, goodbye comrade

Our colleague and friend Claudia has left us, and from Honduras to all of Latin America, she leaves behind a memorable legacy. Claudia was an engineer, always with a smile and a warm way of speaking, as well as a commitment and aptitude for teamwork. Claudia was dedicated to highlighting the role of women at her university and in Latin America, and to understanding and implementing virtual learning as a way to reach the most remote places in her country and the region. She took us to La Ceiba, a remote Garifuna paradise that welcomed us with open arms, guided by its rector.

We built the Politicized Social Science Working Group and co-taught the CLACSO virtual seminar for the Florestán Fernández Chair in 2017. This year, Guido Riccono and I designed the virtual seminar “Knowledge Mobilization in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” which included her presentation. She was enthusiastic about all the activities we were planning and about my dream of her coordinating the next phase. Claudia had to cancel a trip to Uruguay funded by the 2017 seminar, and later Ivanise Monfredini and I learned that her health had begun to fail her. However, she found the courage to come to Buenos Aires for the CLACSO event in 2018, and we renewed our projects and hopes.

We know that her legacy lives on in her writings, in the Notebooks of Latin American Critical Thought, in the Dossier we wrote together for the Cuban Journal of Higher Education, and especially in the opportunity CLACSO gave us to continue sharing experiences, both face-to-face and from afar, experiences that will forever remain in our hearts. Thank you, Claudia, until we meet again! We will hold the seminar we dreamed of in your honor!

Dr. Judith Naidorf
Independent Researcher at CONICET – Institute of Educational Sciences Research – Regular Professor at the Department of Educational Sciences – University of Buenos Aires