Centro Maria Sibylla Merian
Professor of Brazilian Literature at Universidade de São Paulo and researcher of Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. He conducts research on the relationship between culture and violence, emphasizing productions related to authoritative regimes in Brazil. His research project in CALAS is entitled “Violence Representations in the Cinema of Brazil and Mexico”.
Researcher and professor at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Social Sciences of the Universidad Centroamericana. He conducts research on memory construction processes regarding the recent past of Nicaragua and Central America. His research project in CALAS is entitled “Uses of Recent Past and Memory in the Transition to Peace in Nicaragua: Politics, Stakeholders, Discourses, Devices”.
Professor at the School of Literature and Spanish Language of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras. His work aims at articulating cultural and literary criticism with the search of responses to extreme violence situations in Central America. His research project in CALAS is entitled “Fractured Voices: Testimonies of Violence in the North Triangle of Central America”.
Jose Vicente Tavares dos Santos is Senior Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Director of the ILEA - Latin American Institute for Advanced Studies (2012-2020) - UFRGS. Doctorat d’Etat from the University of Paris - Nanterre (1987). Researcher at CNPq - National Council for Scientific and Technological Development; Former president of ALAS - Latin American Sociological Association (2003-2005) and SBS - Brazilian Society of Sociology (1998-2001).
He holds a five-year university degree in Philosophy awarded by Universidad de Santiago de Chile, and a master's degree in Interamerican Studies awarded by Universität Bielefeld. His research project is entitled “Civilization and Barbarism as Repetition: Reception of Fascism and National Socialism in Argentina and Chile as a Crisis of the Republican Project of the 19th Century and its Intellectual, Political and Aesthetic Drifts during the 30s and 40s”.
Professor Emerita of Italian, French and Spanish Philology at Universität Düsseldorf. She conducts research on biopolitics, life poetics and ecological practices in Latin American cultures and literatures. Her research project in CALAS is entitled “The De/Institution of Peace and the Power of the Living: The Indetermination Zone as Relationality of Peace and Violence”.
Compared to other world regions, Latin America is characterized by high levels of social inequality. Although past governments have tried to address this condition through different social policies, the highly unequal distribution of income and wealth has remained persistent. Some economic sectors such as finance, telecommunications, commerce and agro-industry are highly concentrated and dominated by a handful of corporations (grupos economicos). Similarly, and in the light of expanding agricultural frontiers, the ownership of land shows an increasingly unequal distribution.
Die Corona-Krise trifft Lateinamerika mit besonderer Härte. Die Gesundheitssysteme sind prekär und über soziale Absicherung verfügen nur Wenige. Schon vor dem Ausbruch der Pandemie befand sich die Region in einer tiefen wirtschaftlichen, politischen und sozialen Krise. Armut, soziale Ungleichheiten, autoritäre Politiken, Korruption, Gewalt sowie die Diskriminierung sozialer, politischer und kultureller Rechte haben in den letzten Jahren stark zugenommen und provozierten Unmut und Massenproteste.
El Laboratorio Visiones de Paz se interesa por los entrelazamientos y transiciones entre violencia y paz en América Latina. La paz se comprende no como un estado al que se pueda llegar de forma definitiva, sino como un proceso que se ve afectado por diversos factores políticos, sociales, discursivos, etc. La inestabilidad de paces imperfectas, las tendencias a resolver conflictos por medio de mecanismos violentos (a través de las armas, por ejemplo) hace que la paz y la violencia puedan coexistir de formas contradictorias.
El Laboratorio Visiones de Paz de CALAS considera que el problema de la violencia policial cobró particular relevancia luego del asesinato de George Floyd en Estados Unidos en mayo de 2020. En Latinoamérica es igualmente un problema recurrente, desde los centenares de mutilaciones oculares a manifestantes durante las protestas sociales de octubre de 2019 en Chile, a las muertes de Giovanni López en México y de Javier Ordóñez a manos de la policía colombiana en septiembre del presente año, entre otros.
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