Tomás Schierenbeck holds a BA in history from the UNLP and is a PhD candidate in interdisciplinary social studies of Europe and Latin America (UNLP / Universität Rostock). He is a doctoral fellow of the CONICET, working at the IdIHCS. His research focuses on periodicals and antifascist editorial projects developed within the German-speaking communities in Argentina during World War II.

The Plots of Identity: The Weekly Argentinisches Wochenblatt and the Construction of a Cultural Reference in the German Argentine Communities (1939-1945)
This research project aims to investigate the weekly Argentinisches Wochenblatt and its publishing house, Alemann & Cia, as a cultural reference for German-speaking communities in Latin America during World War II. Specifically, it examines these platforms as sites for the production, circulation, and negotiation of discourses mediated by ethnicity and the migrant experience – whether forced or voluntary – of this collective. For this purpose, the project analyses segments, sections, and cultural productions published in the weekly that focus not on the grand war narratives of the period, but rather on addressing and problematising issues of the community’s daily life, such as integration, cultural differences with the host society, and the maintenance of language as the primary means of entertainment. These aspects are crucial in shaping an identity narrative. Additionally, the research investigates the value of this publication as a political reference point for the exiles of the National Socialist regime in Latin America. Several exiles worked in this publication (among other magazines) as part of their opposition to the National Socialist regime and developed from it an anti-fascist political and intellectual network. In this context, the project begins by understanding this network as literary production and the practice of reading as instances and means of the cultural struggle against fascism.

Philipp Seidel is a research assistant at the Institute for Latin American Studies at FU Berlin. He obtained a master’s degree in romance literature (with a focus on Spanish and Portuguese) from FU Berlin and subsequently worked as a university assistant at Paris Lodron University Salzburg, from 2016 to 2019. He is currently pursuing his doctorate with a project on neo-baroque literature in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil as a genuine expression of Latin American queer aesthetics. He co-organized the publication Cuerpos diversos. Estéticas de diversidad corporal en España y América Latina en los siglos XX y XXI (2023). His research focuses on Caribbean literature, the (neo)avant-gardes, the neo-baroque, the literary and cultural representation of minorities from a queer perspective, and the relationship of (marginalised) bodies.

Opulence as Alterity: Ideology and Negotiations of Divergent Identity Constructions in Neo-Baroque Literatures: Néstor Perlongher, Pedro Lemebel, and Herbert Daniel.

This project examines three eccentric figures of recent Latin American literature: the Argentinian Néstor Perlongher, the Brazilian Herbert Daniel, and the Chilean Pedro Lemebel. As homosexuals, all three faced strong marginalisation in societies shaped by machismo, which intensified significantly under the repressive military dictatorships in Argentina (1976-1983), Brazil (1964-1985) and Chile (1973-1990). This experience of alterity made them all the more determined to write against all forms of oppression and marginalisation. As a poetic programme, they embraced the neo-baroque, one of the central currents in Latin American art and literary production since the mid-20th century, which spread rhizomatically from the Caribbean across almost the entire continent. The neo-baroque aesthetic playfully incorporates a wide variety of stylistic elements and combines these fragments in a provocative gesture to challenge and dismantle established boundaries, repeatedly raising the question of how different identities are constituted. The neo-baroque can be understood not only as an original mode of expression for Latin American art and culture, but also as an alternative genealogy for queer theory in Latin America.

PhD candidate in Anthropology at USP with a master’s degree in anthropology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. She has served as a visiting researcher at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University (IU). She is a member of the Anthropology, Performance, and Drama Research Group at USP and the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT) at IU. She co-directed the documentaries A vida é um remanso [Life is a Backwater] and Eu vim da areia sambar [I Came from the Sand to Samba] and conceived the Festival of Riverside batuques in partnership with quilombola communities from the upper middle São Francisco River. Her ethnographic research in this region explores the complex dynamics of riverside performances, focusing on the Ponto Chique batuque in the context of environmental and social changes. She has research experience in ethnomusicology, performance anthropology, and visual anthropology.

Life is a Backwater: Performance and Narrative in the batuque of Ponto Chique (São Francisco River, Brazil) in the Context of Environmental Changes
This research project aims to investigate the relationship between performance and narrative by analysing the representations of the Ponto Chique batuque (Brazil) in the context of environmental changes and profound transformations in the São Francisco River. The hypothesis is that by articulating images of the past with the present, batuqueiros and riverside dwellers revitalize their communities and address conflicts that threaten the batuqueiros, the river, and the entire environment. In this process, we intend to develop an approach that involves both body and camera in the field to analyse the meanings conveyed through dance, sounds, and narratives, thus creating a significant cultural repertoire in the Upper Middle São Francisco River region. To achieve this, the present experiment combines concepts and methods from performance anthropology, visual anthropology, and ecological anthropology.

Isabela Maia Pereira de Jesus holds an undergraduate degree in languages and literature from Universidade Estadual Paulista /FCLAr (2017), focusing on Portuguese, Latin, and German. She also earned a master’s degree in literary studies from the same institution in 2020, specializing in the poetics of late Latin Antiquity. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at the UzK, affiliated with the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne and the Luso-Brazilian Institute of the UzK, focusing on Brazilian studies in romance philology. Her research interests include the representation of subjectivities in literature, as well as the political and social critical dimensions of literature and its role in contemporary times.

The Construction of Subjectivities and the Mythopoetic in A obscena senhora D by Hilda Hilst and O manto da noite by Carola Saavedra

This doctoral project examines Hilda Hilst’s A obscena senhora D (1982) and Carola Saavedra’s O manto da noite (2022). Through comparative analysis, we focus on the construction of subjectivities and identities, as well as the mythopoetic aspects, by observing the authors’ language and narrative strategies. We structure the research around three main sections. First, we examine the construction of characters’ subjectivities and identities. In both works, characters’ identities fragment into human and non-human forms, undergoing various metamorphoses and transformations. These characters exist in turbulent, chaotic contexts and possess fluid identities. We primarily analyse how the narratives conceive subjectivities through a decentralizing use of language. The decentralized narrators reflect the fluidity of the characters’ identities in both Hilst’s and Saavedra’s novels. In the second stage of the research, we delve into narrative techniques that express a decentralization and transgression of the narrator figure, as both novels employ a polyphonic narrative focus. This multitude of voices that compose the narrative focus, along with the dissolution of the narrator’s identity, begins to affect the text itself. In this sense, we observe the coexistence and blending of literary genre boundaries in both books so that the body of the text also experiences the constant movement of its characters. Finally, we investigate the transformation and reinterpretation of traditional myths to transcend and question the Western cultural imaginary. Saavedra revisits colonial myths by exploring historical moments of the colonization of Brazil and South America, seeking to reconstruct, in a certain way, the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples that were destroyed and forgotten by the violence of the colonial past. At the same time, Hilst highlights the impasse between the human and the divine, between life and death, in a way that seems to revisit and contradict aspects of Christian fundamentals, particularly the idea of an omnipresent God who possesses a single truth, to confront the paternalism present in the Western world. Overall, our main objective is to investigate how Hilst and Saavedra, each in their own way, address issues of identity construction and confront dominant thoughts through the transcendence and radicalization of traditional literary forms of the novel.

Historian and master’s in history from the Universidad de Antioquia. Master’s in history from El Colegio de México. Currently, a PhD student in history at El Colegio de México. Member of the Social History Research Group (GIHS) of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidad de Antioquia. His academic topics and research interests include the agrarian and rural history of Colombia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, particularly problems related to distribution, inequality, conflicts, negotiations, agrarian structure, and land possession, tenure and ownership. He also researches agriculture and livestock, employing an approach that dialogues between agrarian history and environmental and climatic history in the Colombian Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Land, Crops and Livestock: Agrarian and Environmental History of the Sinú Valley and San Jorge (Colombian Caribbean), 1850-1970
The central thesis of this research is that, in the valley of the Sinú and San Jorge rivers, between the decades of 1850 and 1970, there was a process of agrarian change on the one hand, and a process of environmental transformation on the other. These two processes were part of the same historical change: the establishment of cattle ranching as the main socioeconomic activity in the Colombian Caribbean plains. The agrarian change is demonstrated through the transformation of land ownership and tenure, or agrarian structure, which underwent modifications due to the appropriation and privatization of uncultivated lands, communal lands, and indigenous reserves, aimed at forming cattle ranches. Meanwhile, environmental change is demonstrated through the transformation of the ecosystems and landscapes of the Sinú and San Jorge valleys, resulting from the replacement of tropical forests and woodlands with pastures and paddocks for cattle production.

Professor of education sciences at UNLP. She is a CONICET doctoral fellow, pursuing her PhD in educational sciences at UNLP. Her research focuses on higher education studies, specifically student participation in institutional policy across three Argentine universities. She also serves as a university lecturer for the Educational Research 1 chair and as the coordinator of the course for admission to educational sciences at UNLP.

The Students’ Agendas in the Construction of University Policies: A Case Study
The research aims to analyse the influence of student agendas on the institutional policies of three Argentine universities – Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento and Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche – during the period 2018-2022. In Argentine public universities, there are representative bodies that allow student demands to be channelled into institutional policies. These policies, while commonly recognized, have been little studied. This research, grounded in theoretical frameworks on university government within the field of higher education, studies on student and youth status, and public policy analysis, will use a multiple case study approach. The aim is to deepen the understanding of the process through which students contribute to institutional policy formation, characterizing the policies that students advocate for at the institutional level, and examining the strategies they employ. Particular attention will be given to the mechanisms that enable certain student agenda items to become part of the university’s official agenda.