KNOWLEDGE LABORATORY “A REGION ON THE MOVE: ACCELERATED HUMAN MOBILITIES AND MULTIPLE CIRCULATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN”

The Americas, and particularly Latin America and the Caribbean, appear to be a prominent case for studying how movement, mobility, and migration constantly reshape space. This Knowledge Laboratory highlights how spaces emerge in the first place through human movement, with the creation of America being the prime example that also demonstrates the processes of spatial transformation through colonial occupation. One of its objectives is to reconstruct historically fundamental spatial reconfigurations of the past.

The Laboratory focuses primarily on the contemporary history and the present of Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the second half of the 20th century, the subcontinent seems to be on the move, with internal migrations and rural exoduses, as well as displacements and exiles due to armed conflicts and political persecutions. These spatial reconceptualizations can be approached from various signifying practices, including art, literature, cinema, and television, or social media services within the space of intermediality. The circulation of knowledge is also linked to science and technology.

The Knowledge Laboratory aims to contribute to transnational reflection from a relational perspective on human mobilities and displacements, which acquire new aspects every day. In this way, it opens debates and contributes to solutions regarding the diverse aspects of knowledge and its strategic role in this situation of accelerations. The goal is to propose possible horizons that provide inclusive responses to the demands that these transformations imply. At stake is how the mobility of people relates to the circulation of goods, materials, ideas, and knowledge, conceived as an unequal exchange between interacting people, places, groups, and cultures in connection with non-human elements, which include a diversity of migratory movements as well as their effects.

Research Axes:

1. Human mobility, circulation of ideas, and new signifying practices – transnational cultures and global political cultures.
2. Space on the move: mobility and the reconfiguration of space, as well as the creation of new spaces.
3. New forms of (dis)integration, (in)equality, and social cohesion in processes of accelerated mobility and multiple circulation.
4. Mobility and accelerations in the labor field and the new social question.

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