Configurations and regimes of Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America and elsewhere have been continuously framed through colonial legacies and their contestation. Often, the historically constituted social reality imposes inequality, (post)colonial hierarchies, and multiple violences onto bodies, memories, knowledges, and materialities of everyday life. While this has resulted in increasing social divide and political polarization, both artistic-poetic practices and civil protests contest this state of affairs and offer alternative horizons. Under these tasking circumstances, the forms and registers of living together among humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans are at stake.

Addressing Mecila’s yearly theme “Colonialidades”, the Annual Meeting and Young Researchers Forum 2022 bring together some of the most promising debates on contestations of colonialities that have a stake in the continuous negotiations of conviviality in Latin America. The Distinguished Dialogue offers an intersectional, feminist, and decolonial reading of the current social revolts and institutional changes in Latin American countries. The Keynote Lecture uncovers the relative autonomy in reflexive-poetic practice pitted against the historical regimes of social suffering. The three Round Tables engage the challenges of democratic practice, polarization and suffering further, as well as contestations, openings and new becomings, not least in urban settings. The Workshops/Panels and Young Researchers Forum invite for debate on current research projects at/related to Mecila, focusing in particular on the entanglements of colonialities and conviviality with life and the Anthropocene, gender and patriarchy, as well as the body, memory and the situatedness of knowledge production.

Conviviality-Inequality, Mecila’s key conceptual framework, raises due awareness for the empirical detail of processes, practices, and materialities, as well as the resulting contradictions, ambiguities, and tensions in the contemporary contestations and negotiations occurring in Latin American societies and states, as well as beyond. The Annual Meeting aims to reinforce multiple, empirical and theoretical dialogues and relational perspectives that can contribute to societal and scientific regenerations.

Location: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros – Universidade de São Paulo, CEBRAP, Museu Afro Brasil