The Mecila Annual Meeting is the central platform of Mecila to present and discuss the main interdisciplinary research results of the Mecila community together with invited researchers. It plays an important role for the articulation of the three Mecila Research Areas. The Young Researchers Forum has the specific objective to foster the international exchange and networking of early career researchers, addressing specific challenges and making visible their research contributions. This year, the Ibero-Amerikanisches Intitut is the main organizer of the Annual Meeting and Young Researchers Forum, as this responsibility rotates among the German institutions of the Mecila consortium.

The Mecila Annual Meeting and Young Researchers Forum 2023 “Medialities of Conviviality – Inequality in Latin America” is conceptually shaped by Mecila’s annual theme “Medialities”. It focusses on how asymmetries of knowledge and divergent knowledge practices and representations frame conviviality (e.g. negotiations of interclass, intercultural, interethnic, inter-gender and human-non human relations). We will discuss asymmetries of knowledge disputing over relevant social issues such as symbolic belonging, political participation, resource distribution, and access to power. We will confront questions posed by
the inequalities that have contributed to shaping dynamics of marginalisation and exclusion of voices, especially indigenous, afro-descendant, female, and socioeconomically disadvantaged. The digital turn is transforming and reshaping knowledge production, circulation and appropriation in new and unprecedented ways. The increasing use of social media can have quite divergent effects on conviviality in Latin America. Is digital transformation able to reduce persistent knowledge inequalities, or does it create new ones? We will exchange on medialities within archives in a broad sense where difference and inequalities in meanings,
practices, and human-non human relations are negotiated. We are interested in learning more about the relations between activism and social sciences and their general impact on the relation between conviviality and inequality in Latin America and other world regions.

The visit to the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (MAE / Universidade de São Paulo) has the objective of experiencing in situ the medialities of conviviality from the perspective of knowledge management and the challenges of the information infrastructures in convivial contexts shaped by knowledge asymmetries. The public event at the Goethe-Institut São Paulo strengthens the strategic cooperation between Mecila and the Goethe Institutes but also opens other spaces of broader cultural exchanges.

Location: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros – Universidade de São Paulo, Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, Goethe-Institut