Doctoral Researchers

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.

Aline Correa holds a MA in sociology from the Universidade Federal Fluminense. She is a specialist in Southern epistemologies from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales and is a PhD candidate in Latin American regional studies at UzK. Her main interests revolve around racialisation, gender, and how they intersect with temporal conceptions in the context of national formation in Latin America. In her current project for Mecila, she focuses on sociology and history. By addressing the family as a convivial arrangement, her work assesses the process of instrumentalisation of the family in the transition to the republican period in Brazil. Focusing on the idealisation of the female role and the linking of offspring to the nation’s future, she seeks to highlight and discuss how temporal conceptions cut across racialised gender relations in the country.

Arturo Ríos is a historian, a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a doctoral candidate at COLMEX. He is a member of the international group “Atarraya: Historia Política y Social Iberoamericana”. His main areas of interest are the history and building of 19th century democratic regimes, electoral processes, petition-centered movements, circulation of information, and the overlaps between social history and the history of political languages. His current research project explores the growth of petitions as a phenomenon in 19th century Mexico, as well as the challenges that they posed for representative governments (some contemporary scholars regard petitions as a tool of true democracy). More specifically, his project investigates the relationship between public petitions (peticiones populares) and appeals to the people (apelaciones al pueblo), both of which are antecedents to contemporary forms of referendum, such as plebiscitos and consulta.

Camila de Oro is a graduate of the UNLP in literary studies and a CONICET doctoral scholarship recipient. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Sociocultural Studies (Europe and Latin America), a joint programme of the UNLP and the University of Rostock. Her first thesis project was on the publication Los Poetas, a volume of the series bibliotecas published by the editing house Editorial Claridad. Her current doctoral project focuses on the role of Editorial Claridad and Alejandro Korn in popularising German culture in Argentina. Her research interests in terms of theory and methodology are popular print literature, history of the book and of editing, and the history of ideas.

Clara Cuevas is a doctoral candidate in history at CEH, COLMEX and holds a graduate degree (mestrado) in history from the Federal University of Paraná. Her doctoral thesis project titled Un poco de sangre: la mercantilización de la sangre en México, 1940 a 1987 examines the political, social, and economic dimensions of the sale of blood in México, from the institutionalisation of blood banks to the HIV crisis. She is a former researcher of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project on technology and inequality “Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City”; a current member of the Ibero-American research network on sexuality Red-LIESS of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide of Seville; and a researcher in the working group History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Latin America of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She is an historian of the body and technology.

Claudio Cardinali holds an undergraduate degree in Geography from USP (2015) and another in Multilingual Communication, with a focus on translation in English, French, and German, from the Technische Hochschule Köln (2018), as well as an MA in Language and Literature – French/Portuguese from UzK (2020). He is currently a doctoral candidate associated with the Luso-Brazilian Institute of UzK and the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at USP.

Aesthetics and Dialectics in the Periphery: The Reception of Critical Theory in the Work of Roberto Schwarz
The aim of his research is to specify Brazilian essayist Roberto Schwarz’s understanding of literature, based on a comparison with authors who are part of the tradition associated with Schwarz, including Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The primary focus is the reception of these thinkers in Schwarz’s essays, with special reference to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and Benjamin’s understanding of History. In the first stage, each individual perspective is drawn into a convergence. The aim is to establish the extent to which Schwarz is undeniably an heir to German Critical Theory. In the second stage, the work of the Brazilian critic is discussed from the perspective of his own argument. According to Schwarz, Brazil’s position on the periphery of capitalism enabled a writer like Machado de Assis to understand not only the fundamental social dynamics of the post-colonial period in the country, but also to point out ex negativo the distinctive features of the modes of being at the centre of the world system. The underlying idea here is that the ‘Brazilian version’ of Critical Theory, embodied in Schwarz’s essays, has specific traits that afford insights often more comprehensive than those of its ‘classic version’.

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.

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.

Juan holds a MA in Latin American literature from the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) as well as a degree in Brazilian culture from the Universidad de San Andrés. He teaches Latin American literature at UNLP. He has received several scholarships and participated in exchanges, internships, and research projects in Brazil, Germany, Cuba, and Paraguay. He has received an honourable mention in the X International Prize “Dr Leopoldo Zea” for best graduate thesis in Latin America and Caribbean Studies (CIALC-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Currently, he serves as director of UNSAM’s journal Transas, Letras y Artes de América Latina and cultural manager of the Fabrica Cultural “En Eso Estamos” in La Plata.

Leila Giovana Izidoro is currently pursuing her doctoral studies in Human Rights at USP. She holds a graduate degree (mestrado) in the same area from the same institution. During her graduate studies, she completed a research internship at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIS-UNAM). She is a member of the research group Human Rights, Centrality of Labour, and Marxism (DHCTEM-USP) and the Latin American Climate Lawyers Initiative for Mobilizing Action (LACLIMA). Her research agenda focuses on the labour struggles of waste-pickers in Latin America. At Mecila, she examines the impact of the process of financialisation of the environment in the construction of these workers’ legal subjectivity, based on a case study of the interactions that take place in the reverse logistics of recyclable packaging in Brazil, especially in the city of São Paulo.

Green Jobs and Legal Subjectivity: A Study Based on the Recycling Industry in Latin America
This research project aims to assess the extent to which the financialisation of the environment has shaped the “entrepreneurial” legal subjectivity of waste-pickers in Latin America. An assessment of waste-pickers’ work within the scope of the concept of “green jobs”, as defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), indicates the emergence of a new understanding of “employment”, one that embraces atypical hiring practices as a reflection of the workers’ free initiative. Based on Karl Marx’s labour theory of value and Evgeni Pachukanis’ critique of the legal form, this comparative case study examines the relations between waste-pickers, corporations, and the State with regard to the reverse logistics of recyclable packaging in Brazil and Mexico. In reverse logistics, waste-pickers are remunerated for the tonnage of waste collected, with offsetting increments according to the type of material, a co-operative credit fund, or provision of resources for operational improvements in their activities. Such a scenario of apparent coexistence in the sphere of circulation leaves aside the inequality in terms of production, whereby the exploitation of waste-pickers’ labour power occurs at the bottom of the recycling chain. The project identifies the constraints imposed by capital on the political power of these workers, steering them towards contracts and the enterprises’ sustainability.