NewsletterThe Knowledge Laboratory "Strategic identities and crisis in Latin America. Processes and tensions" of CALAS addresses the notions and interrelations of identities and crisis in Latin America from an interdisciplinary approach between social sciences, humanities and art. It proposes to take up, by way of synthesis, the guiding questions of CALAS on how crises provoke, make visible or are a symptom of profound social changes; how social change induced by crises is perceived and reflected by various social actors in different fields, from politics, economics, cultural production, the media and social movements.
In Latin America, especially the contemporary crises have been expressed in a high level of political and economic conflict and social struggle between hegemonic powers and subalternized identities. Thus, the Laboratory considers, among other issues, the struggles for cultural visibility and territorial restitution in the case of ethnic identities such as, for example, the Mapuche; the legal prosecution of the continued violence against women and LGTBQ+ people; the dignification of Afro identities; class identity increasingly threatened by the constant global economic crises; migratory flows, product of growing social inequality; the rights of youth; or the historically excluded regions within what we define as Latin America and the Caribbean.
The invitation of the Laboratory is to reflect on how crises and strategic identities intersect; how identities are constructed and reconstructed, their variations, ruptures and cracks; how contortions are expressed in images, concepts and aesthetic manifestations that constantly condense and reinvent them; how social actors participate in these processes based on specific problems, empirical analysis and/or reelaboration of theoretical-methodological models, problems and research questions.
In this way, we expect collective discussions, among others, on how identities are regulated and emerge in the face of crises, and how crises make possible or impossible the affirmation of invisible identities, or the emergence of new identities, which in turn translate into cultural representations and actions? What happens to the most deeply rooted identities in the processes of crisis? Do the identities that emerge in open performances or closed narratives represent, invent, reconfigure collective memories, or correspond to new social imaginaries? To what extent can these new identity proposals formulated from Latin America serve as a model at the global level in order to reverse the traditional unidirectionality of the North-South or center-periphery relationship? What are the implications of mobility from Caribbean countries, including French-speaking countries such as Haiti, on the configuration and reconfiguration of Afro-identities?