In the fourth edition of the Summer School on social issues, researchers and students shared experiences and reflections on their practices.
In the fourth edition of the Summer School on social issues, held at the University of Tarapacá in Arica between December 12 and 16, 2023, professors from Peru, the United States, Colombia, Denmark, Argentina, and Chile, along with 33 students from various disciplines, gathered in 7 intensive workshops to work on methodologies and research topics linked to this year’s theme: “Recurrent Social Problems: Crisis, Continuity, and Demands for Change in Latin America”.
In the different workshops, recurring themes were addressed, from extractivism and climate change, Human Rights violations, indigenous rights, and the invisibility of the lives of girls, boys, and adolescents, to populism and the question of authority in democracy. In doing so, they invited students to consider their research projects in dialogue with comparative studies and diverse theoretical perspectives to address the present and the past.
For Juan Felipe Riaño, a Ph.D. student in Geography at the University of California, LASI 2023 was “an intellectually challenging experience, and I valued the hemispheric collaboration that was generated among students from the United States, Central America, and South America, to discuss regional issues we study”.
Sharing with researchers with extensive experience enriches one’s own research experiences, “especially if they are disciplines different from our initial training,” emphasized Javiera Roa, a Ph.D. student in Sociology at UAH supported by VioDemos, who also highlighted the opportunity to discuss methodological, ethical, theoretical, and disciplinary debate aspects from a broader perspective of the social sciences.
In the workshop “Supply Chain Capitalism: Transformations of Rural Landscapes in Latin America,” Cari Tusing and Stine Krøijer delved into different forms of spatial analysis. For example, based on non-human aspects in indigenous contexts by applying interspecies ethnography, or by tracking older people through historical ethnography, combining material with the State and its multiple roles in the trajectories of communities and places.
“When we write, we tend to overlook details and anecdotes, but it is these small moments that bring ethnography to life and are part of the object. Our text cannot remain a mere explanation; it must help understand from the gaps in the paragraphs how the experience of entering the field was and evidence the bodily experiences of living or not living in environmental, rural, mobility conflicts, among others,” Stine Krøijer, professor at Copenhagen University, elaborated.
“In this sense, sensory and embodied ethnography emerges as an alternative to put into writing what we want to record, as it pays attention not only to humans but to everything else. It implies a sensitivity to how we approach phenomena. It is an interdisciplinary perspective between the arts, natural and social sciences to approach landscapes and work on new ways of observing,” commented Cari Tusing, lecturer at the University Austral of Chile.
Listening to the voices of communities and often silenced agents can enrich the knowledge and analysis of contemporary problems afflicting the continent and our country. In this sense, children and adolescents have much to contribute, despite always being relegated to the shadow of the adult world, as addressed in the workshop “Someone should think about children. The challenges of thinking about contemporary childhoods in Latin America”, guided by Gabriela Piña and Ana Carolina Hecht.
“Despite what is usually thought, children and adults share many characteristics when considering variables such as gender, ethnicity, and class. No group is exempt from them, but girls and boys are often seen as “incomplete adults”, “human capital”, “innocents or angels” in contrast to those “dangerous and irrational’ children”, also “adults of the future,'” explained Gabriela Piña, professor of Anthropology at UC and researcher at CIIR and VioDemos.
Ana Carolina Hecht, from the University of Buenos Aires, pointed out that these stereotypes are problematic because, although it is necessary to maintain childhood as a particular category, it is essential to avoid essentializing children or taking away their agency and/or resistance: “As adults, we often overlook the practices of children from an adult-centric perspective of resistances, invalidating their opinions even before asking them.”
The same occurs with people deprived of liberty and in displacement situations. Both migrants and prisoners are considered undesirable and “illegalists” due to racist and punitive variables. These aspects jeopardize the processes of insertion and social cohesion of migrants and incarcerated individuals into public debate.
“We must rethink together borderization and carceralization as regimes, spaces, subjectivities, forms of management. The invitation is to step out of the box of prison studies, to leave the compartments,” commented Angel Aedo, Director of VioDemos and professor of Anthropology at UC, during the workshop “Managing the undesirable: rethinking prison and border work”, which he led along with Julienne Weegels, professor at the University of Amsterdam.
Carceralism is not only the prison; rather, it has to do with the operation of confinements and expulsions: “We must understand the metaphorization of the idea of prison. For example, pandemic as prison, work as confinement. Asking other people how they experience their metaphors of confinement in society, how it becomes something that operates and confines the body,” explained Julienne Weegels.
How is memory constructed? The place of “artifacts” and affectivity
Just as new perspectives are necessary in approaching reality, it is also necessary to inquire about how the past is being read and on what basis, a theme addressed in the workshop “Gender and Memory: Archives, materialities, and affections” guided by Oriana Bernasconi from the Alberto Hurtado University and Tania Pérez Bustos from the National University of Colombia.
For the researchers, the archive functions as a mode of truth production that can destabilize logics of control and domination. Understood as socio-technical artifacts, archives are more than a source of information. “They are devices that allow the inscription of a situation or social fact that transcends its place of occurrence to be available for another time and generation,” pointed out Bernasconi, VioDemos researcher and UAH sociology academic.
How was this archive created? Who thinks about the facts and from where? What types of intellectual, affective, moral, and political interventions are involved when documenting? How can this relationship change and activate other social processes? These are some of the questions that guided the workshop.
“Documentation is a field in dispute, where inscription and forgetting are forces that oppose each other in an attempt to witness and leave a mark on what happened. It addresses materiality, silences, methods, and practices, modes of access, and truth statuses,” Tania Bustos emphasized. Thinking about the archive from a gender perspective can lead to counter-hegemonic forms regarding affiliation and recognition, and allows thinking of women’s bodies as another space of record to tell stories.The LASI Summer School on Social Problems is an initiative that already has 4 editions and aims to be an interdisciplinary space for training new researchers. This edition was organized jointly by the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR), the Millennium Institute for Research on Violence and Democracy (VioDemos), the Department of Anthropology of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the Millennium Nucleus in Andean Peatlands, and the University of Tarapacá, with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
