CALAS

Confronting inequalities in Latin America

The Laboratory analyses social inequalities from the perspective of wealth and power within the following research lines:

Modul 1) Regulation and deregulation of wealth.

One of the most important policy instruments for reducing inequality is undoubtedly the taxation of wealth. The history of the tax system in Latin America goes back to the time of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, their cycles of independence, and the construction of the new Republics Read more.

Modul 2) Study of wealth and the elites.

While the subject of poverty has been studied from all its facets, there is almost no research on the richest. A first approach to this challenge might be taken by research on the economic elites. Read more.

Modul 3) Wealth, power, and nature.

The representatives of wealth do not exercise their power only through economic power, but also through channels of political influence and family ties. These are above all the flows of transactions between politics and the economy, which are referred to under the concepts of: interlocking, revolving doors or multipositionality. Read more.

ConDiv: Researching wealth, power and nature: convergences and divergences between social sciences and humanities

The main objective of CALAS is to reach out, through interdisciplinary cooperation, towards a transdisciplinary reflection that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries. Within this framework, the laboratory calls for meta-critical reflections that explicitly address convergences and divergences (ConDiv) between the humanities and the social sciences regarding academic discourses on power and wealth in Latin America, focusing on the discursive patterns in academia on the regulation and deregulation of wealth. Read more.

Inequalities in the context of a pandemic

The Laboratory's focus on inequities has become even more complicated with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020. It is a collective responsibility, at the political, economic and social levels, of the group of coordinators of the laboratory in particular and CALAS in general, to address the impacts of COVID-19 in the region. With this commitment, the laboratory is carrying out a study of the impact of COVID-19 on the multiple inequalities in the region, which are affected by the sanitary crisis.