Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Ph.D.

Conferences and talks

BHL Keynote Address

In 2021, I had the honor to be the closing keynote speaker for BHL’s annual meeting, “BHL Day 2021: Reflections in Crises,” with a talk titled “Decolonizing strategies for an equitable Biodiversity Heritage Library.” You can watch the recording below, introduced by Constance Rinaldo and moderated by Bianca Crowley.

Selected Conferences and Presentations

  • “Selección y Anotación Anti-colonial de Imágenes de BHL” / “Sélection et annotation anticoloniales des images de BHL” / “Anti-Colonial Selection and Annotation of Images from BHL.” #1Pic1Bio Series, BHL’s Wikimedia Working Group, Online, March and April 2025. Three presentations in Spanish (March 26), French (March 28), and English (April 2nd; session in Portuguese with live translation).
  • “Challenging the Commons of Biodiversity Knowledge: Latin America in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.” ASLE+AESS 2023 Conference, Oregon Convention Center, July 2023.
  • “The (de)coloniality of biodiversity collections: Latin America and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.” Guest speaker at the STS 2023 virtual event series on Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion in Science and Technology Librarianship. American Library Association (ALA) Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Science and Technology section (STS), June 2023.
  • “Multilingual Bio-Diversity and the Decolonization of the Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Case of Latin America.” Digital Humanities 2022. Virtual conference of the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), July 2022.
  • Heather Rogers and Lidia Ponce de la Vega. “Web Scraping for Environmental History Research.” Webinar hosted by the Network in Canadian History & Environment, May 2022.
  • “The Travel Stories of Plants in the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Colonization and (In)Visibility of the Global South in Human-Plants Relationships.” Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA). Online talk series organized by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, January 2022.
  • “Virtual Repatriation: Repaired, Returned, Reborn.” Trans[Creation] Colloquium. Online colloquium hosted by The Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literatures, McGill Digital Humanities and Aarea, June 2021.