Alía Warsco (she/her)

MA Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Fall 2024
MLIS, Fall 2024

Alía is a Brooklyn-based dual-degree student at NYU and LIU. Her work is largely informed by methods of Indigenous and critical librarianship. She is the digital librarian and creator of Runakunaq Bibliotecanku, a collection of resources that center the Andes, Quechua language, and worldwide Indigenous learning. This project was supported by a NYU Digital Humanities Graduate fellowship, which sparked her interests in broader online capabilities for digital learning — including where and how content is displayed. In Spring 2024, Alía was the IIIF Community Coordinator Intern with Digital Scholarship Services at NYU, and worked to integrate IIIF in NYU’s workflows and community.

In her work, she interrogates how—and indeed whether—libraries and archives can be employed for Indigenous language documentation and learning. On the Library Science side, Alía is interested in online libraries and archives, open-access and open educational resources. Alía's projects work directly with communities to provide resources, and access to those resources, in ways that maintain both CARE + FAIR principles for creators. In her subject master's in Latin American and Caribbean studies, Alía is interested in interactions between Indigenous language speakers and the state. This includes how Indigenous peoples are represented, supported, and/or problematized through policy and praxis. She is learning Runasimi (Quechua, Cusco Variety) at New York University, and is working on a thesis that is tentatively named "Language as an Everyday Form of Resistance: The Case of Southern Quechua".