In early January, Tara McPherson, Alexei Taylor, Joan Saab, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Micha Cardenas traveled to São Paulo, Brazil for the 8th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute.  The event (in the words of the Hemi)  is meant to “examine the broad intersections between urban space, performance and political/artistic action in the Americas. From the critical poetics of body art to the occupation of public space by social movements, the event invites participants to explore the borders, identities and practices through which subjectivities, hegemonies and counter-hegemonies are constructed in the spaces of the city and beyond. We are particularly interested in the ways in which bodies both interpellate and are interpellated, mobilize and are mobilized, by and around the diverse and complex “passions” that are so defining of our globalized and mediatized present—fear, hatred, disenchantment, hope and faith, among others. We seek to investigate, collectively, the strategies through which bodies (individual, social and political) make themselves present and intervene aesthetic conventions, social formations and political structures in their search to create new meanings and new modes of sociality.”  Alexei offered a week-long Scalar workshop, while Tara delivered a keynote, “Feminist in a Software Lab,” and participated in a teach-in on the digital humanities.