CALAS

Strategic identities and crises in Latin America. Processes and tensions

Research at the Knowledge Laboratory is organized around four fundamental axes:

Axis 1) Disputes over identity and meanings of the future in and from Latin America. Knowledge, ideas and languages of the crisis.
It proposes to approach, from a transdisciplinary perspective, identities in plural, decentered, critical, territorial and intertwined. The incitement is to reflect on that "obsessive topos" that is still present every time that ethnic, racial, gender and class issues, of senses about nature and territories besiege the answers woven in the last two centuries.
Axis 2) Economic crises and their impact on identities: reconfigurations, ruptures and marks.
It analyzes the links between economic crises in the region, considering them as an opportunity for the visibility of concrete experiences of men, women and gender diversities that have contributed to promote and reconfigure new identities that have been made invisible, the strengthening of others and the displacement and ruptures of those that seemed stable.
Axis 3) Crisis of representation and new identities in the actors of democratic public life.
It proposes to investigate the transformations and crises of the forms of representation of identities in increasingly unpredictable scenarios.
Axis 4) Strategic identities and crisis in Latin America: the example of indigenous peoples.
It focuses on a specific case: indigeneity as a strategic basis for individual and collective identity projects. It analyzes the affirmation, rearticulation and representation (political and poetic) of Latin American ethnic identities from their gradual visibilization since the 1990s, and the consequent demands for new forms of intercultural coexistence, other ways of being and decolonial knowledge that question the traditional narrative of an immutable self-identity completely different from the one imposed by the hegemonic and heteronormative doxa.

 

The theoretical-practical coherence between these four axes is based on the transversalization of two key perspectives: the theoretical-analytical reflection on the decolonial methodology linked to strategic identities and crises, and the practical reflection on the identity (de)constructions and their crises that are exhibited in the various current aesthetic manifestations.