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.

Anai Vera is a Paraguayan anthropologist, biologist, and researcher living in Brazil. Anai is currently pursuing a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo. Her research focuses on Guarani ethnology and other Indigenous peoples of the South American Lowlands. She assists and collaborates with organizations dedicated to Indigenous rights. She worked for ten years in the public sector, at the Ministry of Education and Sciences and the National Secretariat of Culture of Paraguay, participating in the collective development of public policies with and for Indigenous Peoples, grounded in cultural revalorization and strengthening.

What is a forest? Translating the Atlantic Forest through Guarani thought This ethnographic research seeks to understand cosmopolitical and poetic aspects of the translations carried out by two Indigenous thinkers from the Rio Silveira Indigenous Land (Bertioga, SP, Brazil) in relation to the Atlantic Forest. In contrast to the Western designation of this biome, they have proposed thinking of it through the Guarani Mbya term Nhe’ẽry, “the place where souls bathe.” The forest, in this sense, implies a system of multispecies interactions and demands the recognition of the agencies of both human and non-human beings, destabilizing Western conceptions of forest, nature, society—as well as ecology and science. By reflecting on the images and poetics they mobilize, we discuss the particular ways these thinkers translate their cosmology to non-Indigenous society and analyze the alternatives posed by the task of translating worlds (and not just words). Indigenous translation is understood here as a cosmopolitical proposal that contains a radical critique of the Western way of life while also seeking to build bridges between different cultural universes. This research, conducted as an “engaged anthropology” through collaborative methods, aims to amplify the diffusion of Indigenous thought in defense of forests, the struggle for land, and the continuity of the Guarani way of being.

[Picture: Luis Vera]

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.

Boardmember of the Parent in Science movement and a mother of two, Camila is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of São Paulo (USP). Her research involves the dynamics around inclusive policies within the scientific realm, with a special focus on motherhood related ones. Her research objects are the science’s funding bodies and the academic international collaboration framework.

Advancing Gender Equity in ST&I Policies: An analysis of inclusive policies that impact motherhood in academia
The research investigates the dynamics involved in formulating policies that incorporate the maternity perspective in Brazilian academia, articulating a theoretical discussion on social justice and the acceptance of this agenda by science, analyzed as an institution. The work also includes the role of academic activism, especially of a feminist nature, in the dissemination of these ideas that influence scientific policy. The empirical object is the laws at the foundation of the agenda, which guide the right to maternity leave by science funding bodies at different stages of the academic career, as well as the policies, bills and institutional arrangements that paved the way for the construction of the laws.

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’.

Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and undergraduate in History and Images from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ernesto is a CONICET doctoral fellow and is pursuing his doctorate in Language Studies at the UNLP, connected to IdIHCS. He is a member of REICRE, an interdisciplinary research network on cultures and regions, and his research focuses on the History of Ideas.

The Gran Chaco: Imaginary representations of space and social alterities during the first half of the twentieth century
The research investigates the imaginary representations of space and social alterities in the Argentine Gran Chaco, produced between the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It engages with two main discursive types: literary and narrative texts—including essays, fiction, and travel accounts—and discourses with scientific aspirations, particularly scientific anthropology and ethnographic photography. Covering the period from the first military campaigns in the Chaco (1884) to the late 1950s, the study examines ideological convergences, resignifications, and disputes that persist in representations of the region and in the struggle for discursive hegemony. The project explores how representations of Chaco’s Indigenous peoples are shaped by the civilization–barbarism dichotomy, while portrayals of the landscape oscillate between visions of paradise/promised land and desert. It analyzes the tension between cultural constructions of indigeneity and the concrete policies of concentration implemented by the Argentine state and Franciscan religious missions. Additionally, the research examines how these representations, conflicts, and ideologies are reflected in the works of the first generation of artists and intellectuals from Chaco, emerging from the 1940s onward.

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.

Isadora Cardoso holds a bachelor’s in political science from the University of Brasilia and a master’s in globalisation and development studies from Maastricht University. In their PhD, Isadora works at the tensioned borders of activism and research, focusing on discourses and practices on and for climate justice through decolonial, queer, intersectional methods, ethics and concepts. Before the PhD, they were a fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability – RIFS Potsdam, investigating just energy transitions in Brazil and Germany. Isadora has been working with and studying intersectional and decolonial perspectives and solutions to the climate crisis since 2016 with NGOs, UN agencies, social movements and foundations focusing on gender and climate justice in Brazil, Germany, and transnationally at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

One struggle One fight: Intersectional and decolonial action research perspectives on movements and communities demanding climate justice
This research project explores the potentials of combining decolonial, intersectional and queer methods, ideas and ethics to enhance climate justice action research. The project was carried out with activist collectives and communities organised around positionalities/differences, such as youth and Quilombola groups in Brasil, and South Africa, besides participatory observation in international climate conferences and Berlin activist spaces I belong to. In these spaces, Isadora asks questions about how privilege and oppression articulate with demands and visions that research participants have for climate justice. Moved by questions that are grounded on emancipatory critical thought, like how can differently positioned agents work together to end co-dependent oppressive systems and foster justice, and inspired by Patricia Hill Collins (2019) most recent elaboration of intersectionality as critical social theory, they present arguments based on the will to drive change in social research and political organising. By thoroughly reflecting on key moments of the fieldwork, as an accountable process of doing action research in collaboration with marginal(ised) contingents and committed to social transformation, Isadora explores and expands debates and practices on intersectionality, decolonial methods and ethics and and for climate justice.

[Picture: Ana Rodriguez]

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.

Magdalena Tóffoli is a CONICET doctoral fellow at the IdIHCS and a PhD candidate in social sciences at the UNLP, where she previously earned an undergraduate degree (licenciatura) in sociology. Her main research interest is the processes of collective organisation in the sectores populares (working classes), especially among workers in the popular economy.

Subjectivity, engagement, and politics in an Argentine working-class organisation (2016-2021)
My doctoral research aims to contribute to the study of the political experiences of the popular economic sectors by analysing the forms of collective action, participation, and sociability that have developed around the organisation of workers in Argentina. I investigate the processes of social and political mobilisation focussing on the production of subjectivities that these processes enable. I use qualitative methods to analyse the organisation process in Greater La Plata’s popular economy from 2016 to 2020. This approach stresses the perspective of textile, rural, and community-care workers who participated in the Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos (Excluded Workers’ Movement), one of the representative organisations of the sector. I investigate the organisational practices, the meanings attached to participation, and the forms of sociability around the organisation to understand the particularities of this process in relation to the workers’ social and political trajectories.

Maurício Rodrigues Pinto is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at USP (PPGAS-USP). Both his undergraduate degrees in History (bacharel and licenciado) were obtained from the same university, as well as a specialisation in sociopsychology (Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, or FESPSP) and a graduate degree (mestrado) from the interdisciplinary programme Social Change and Political Participation (USP), with the thesis Pelo direito de torcer: das torcidas gays aos movimentos de torcedores contrários ao machismo e à homofobia no futebol. He is a researcher at the Núcleo de Estudos dos Marcadores Sociais da Diferença (Numas/USP), studying dynamics of gender, sexuality, and race in sports, especially in the context of Brazilian football. He also works as a teacher in formal and informal education.

Stories of Life, Stories of the Ball: Trans Football Players and Their Insurgencies on the Field
This research project explores and analyses the personal trajectories of trans football players. While football has attained the status of a national sport in Brazil, it has historically been characterised as belonging to the world of cisheteronormative men. Through ethnographic approaches to amateur indoor and outdoor football teams formed by trans men and transmasculine people, this study aims to show how trans people have taken ownership of the game and re-signified it. The pioneering team is Meninos Bons de Bola, created in August 2016. Today, there are more than 15 transmasculine amateur teams across the country, occupying public spaces traditionally associated with cisgender and supposedly heterosexual men. The main objective is to assess the meanings these teams attribute to the practice of football, and how the presence of transmasculine bodies on the playing fields challenges gender norms and expectations associated with the sport, especially those pertaining to masculinity. Furthermore, the project aims to determine how organising and belonging to exclusive and welcoming football teams may contribute to affirmation, both politically and in terms of identity. The research takes place in a context of political disputes over rights granted to the trans population, including in sports, in view of a number of proposals designed to restrict the participation of trans people in sporting events.

PhD candidate in law at USP, with a master of laws and a master in history degrees. His main fields of interest are legal and social history, and his studies mostly concern the complexities of urban live in Brazilian cities between the end of the 19th century and the 1920s. At Mecila, his project is to study the regulation of urban spaces through municipal legislation, and other normative expressions, comparing the cities of São Paulo, Curitiba, and Belém.

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.

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.

Rafael Elías López Arellano is a sociologist (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and holds a graduate degree (maestría) in history from El Colegio Mexiquense. Currently a PhD candidate in history at COLMEX, López Arellano is interested in the conception and use of the figure of the indio among intellectuals and literati in the context of nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico, specifically, its construction and graphic representation in lithographic art. His doctoral research project addresses the history of lithographic art in Mexico and the visual representations of the indio in literary magazines and albums of this period. He analyses the work of graphic artist Casimiro Castro and geographer Antonio García Cubas to understand the knowledge frameworks and pictorial tradition they employ in their conception and portrayal of the indio. Equally relevant are the markers Castro and Cubas used to identify and characterise this figure.

From consolidating costumbrismo to constructing ethnographic identity: Visual representations of the indio in nineteenth-century Mexico in the work of Casimiro Castro and Antonio García Cubas
My research focusses on the history of lithographic art in Mexico and the visual representations of the indio in the literary magazines and albums in the nineteenth century. My main objectives are to advance the knowledge of the history of this art and of the way that the indio was represented in it; to elucidate some of the ways Casimiro Castro and Antonio García Cubas constructed the image of this demographic; and to determine their contribution to the visual culture of other Mexicans. I argue that the collection of lithographic prints was part of a visual economy that involved a network of collaborators inside and outside the country. I also argue that a bi-vocal analysis of the lithographs, one which considers both text and image, shows the knowledge frameworks of the gaze inherent in their respective visual representations. These portrayals, at times used to describe and at others to identify, exhibits a tension between the picturesque, costumbrismo (folkloric representation), and ethnographic.

Ruby Mascarenhas is a PhD candidate in social and cultural anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin and a DAAD scholarship holder. Their current research examines the professional trajectories of Brazilian travesti performers, transformers, and drag queens in the German entertainment market from the 1960s on. They hold an MA in social anthropology and a BA in social sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

The Travelling Venuses: Brazilian Travestis, Transformistas and Drag Queens in German Travestieshows (1960s–Today)
Since the 1960s, Brazilian travestis, transformistas, and drag queens have performed on stages in Western Europe. The project analyses the development of artistic and professional careers of Brazilian migrants in the Travestieshow scene in Germany from the 1960s onwards, tracing transformations and continuities in a globalised entertainment market. By investigating migration projects related to artistic careers, this research addresses gaps in the scholarship on Brazilian migration to Germany and LGBTQ migration from Brazil to Europe. It contributes to a critical analysis of processes of otherness in German and Brazilian societies and documents the history of overlooked artists. By analysing social markers of difference (such as race and nationality) in both artists’ and media discourses, the goal is to understand the role of racial and national stereotypes in artistic careers and the entertainment sector. The methodology includes archival research, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography.

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.