Recent social, political, technological, and ecological developments suggest that we may be witnessing a transformation of established regimes of conviviality themselves. Accelerated digitalization, intensifying political polarization, deepening social inequalities, and the growing awareness of planetary crises are reshaping the conditions under which social relations are organized, represented, and experienced. These transformations do not simply add new layers to existing inequalities; they reconfigure the very modes, scales, and temporalities of living together.

Against this backdrop, the Mecila Annual Meeting 2026 brings together ongoing debates on conviviality and inequality with questions about the stability, fragility, and transformation of contemporary convivial regimes. The Annual Meeting is conceptually grounded in Mecila’s key analytical framework, conviviality-inequality, which approaches living together as a relational, conflictual, and historically situated process shaped by asymmetries of power, resources, and recognition. Rather than denoting harmonious coexistence, conviviality refers to configurations and regimes in which inequalities are continuously negotiated, reproduced, contested, and sometimes transformed.

The contributions address how changing forms of sociability, knowledge production, political participation, labour, and ecological entanglements affect the ways differences and inequalities are articulated and governed. Particular attention is paid to the ambivalences of these transformations: while new technologies, practices, and forms of mobilization may open spaces for participation, recognition, and epistemic pluralization, they also generate new asymmetries, exclusions, and  concentrations of power. In this context, reflections on Indigenous perspectives and practices—as well as feminist and ecological forms of knowledge—can serve as examples of relational modes of living together grounded in long-standing engagements with territory, care, and collective life. These perspectives challenge dominant assumptions about social organization, responsibility, and coexistence, without being reducible to normative models or ready-made solutions.

Building on Mecila’s interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary orientation, the Annual Meeting encourages empirically grounded and theoretically informed analyses that engage with diverse social actors, knowledge practices, and materialities. Contributions explore how inequalities intersect with race, gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, as well as with human/non-human and more-than-human relations, foregrounding the plurality of social experiences and epistemic positions from which conviviality is enacted, contested, and reimagined.

At a moment when the limits of established social, political, and ecological arrangements are becoming increasingly visible at a global and a planetary level, revisiting the conviviality–inequality nexus is both analytically necessary and politically pressing. The Annual Meeting aims to foster dialogue across disciplines, regions, and epistemologies in order to better understand how regimes of conviviality are changing, what conflicts and possibilities emerge from these shifts, and how more just and sustainable forms of living together might be imagined and enacted.

Location
>>> 01 and 02 September: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros – Universidade de São Paulo (Auditório)
>>> 03 September: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento

Registrations
Please click here to register. Due to limited seating in the auditorium, we kindly ask you to register early, as spots will close once capacity is reached.