Postdoctoral Investigators

Tilmann Heil is an academic staff member of the Iberian and Latin American History Department at Universität zu Köln and a Postdoctoral Investigator at Mecila where he also coordinates the research area [Hi]Stories of Conviviality. His current research project Urban alliances is on the political approximations and shared struggles among long-term and new residents based on ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. His related book project Valued Difference tracks the intersectional assemblages of social hierarchy in Rio de Janeiro. Since his doctoral work, he has sharpened the notion of conviviality in his book Comparing Conviviality as a process of interaction, negotiation and translation from which forms of minimal and fragile sociality emerge. He has addressed situations of ethnic and religious plurality and multilingualism.

Tilmann holds a doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology and an MPhil in interdisciplinary Migration Studies, both from the University of Oxford. Until 2020, he was a FWO Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre / Anthropology Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In the same period, he collaborated with Meron Zeleke on gendered migration from East and West Africa, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In the past, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at Universität Konstanz where he also coordinated a four-year doctoral programme.

Recent publications:
Heil, Tilmann (2020): “Comparing Conviviality. Living with Difference in Casamance and Catalonia”, in: Global diversities, 21, Basingstoke: Palgrave, Springer link.

Heil, Tilmann (2020): “Post/colonial reconfigurations: The disregarded, renewed arrival of Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro”, in: Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 18 (3), 326-340.

Heil, Tilmann and Meissner, Fran (2020): “Deromanticising integration: On the importance of convivial disintegration”, in: Migration Studies.

Heil, Tilmann (2019): “Muslim – Queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: Making sense of relative positionalities”, in: Ethnography, 1–20.

Heil, Tilmann (2019): “Conviviality as diasporic knowledge”, in: African Diaspora, 11 (1-2), 53–70.

Clara Ruvituso is researcher at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin and Postdoctoral Investigator in Mecila, where she coordinates the Research Area “Medialities of Conviviality”. Her doctoral thesis analyzed the controversial reception of Martin Heidegger in Argentina. Currently, she focuses on a much less researched direction of the circulation of knowledge: from South to North. Clara’s main research interest in the framework of conviviality concerns the analysis of inequalities, entanglements and transformations in the production and transregional circulation of Southern Theories. In her project at Mecila, she analyses the circulation of Latin American dependency theories in France and Germany, comparing processes of translation, appropriation, modification and exchanges within structures marked by inequality and difference.

Clara is a sociologist from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and obtained her PhD in Political Science from the Universität Rostock within the framework of the DFG-Graduate School “Cultural Encounters and Discourses of Scholarship”. Until August 2020, she was lecturer and researcher at the Universität Rostock in Political Sciences (2013-2018) and at the Freie Universität Berlin in Sociology (2019-2020). She was a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3).

Recent publications:

Birle, Peter/ Fernández, Enrique/ Ruvituso, Clara (ed.) (2021): Las izquierdas latinoamericanas y europeas: Idearios, praxis y sus circulaciones transregionales en la larga década del sesenta. Iberoamericana/ Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main / Madrid.

Ruvituso, Clara (2021): “Southern Theories und die Öffnung des sozialwissenschaftlichen Kanons: Darcy Ribeiros (vergessener) Beitrag zur Gesellschaftstheorie”, in: Leviathan. Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, 49 (2), 266-285.

Ruvituso, Clara (2020): “Southern Theories in Northern Circulation: Analysing the translation of Latin American dependency theories into German”, in: Tapuya. Latin American Sciences, Technology and Society, 00, 0, 1-15, Online: Routledge.

Ruvituso, Clara (2019): “From the South to the North: The circulation of Latin American dependency theories in the Federal Republic of Germany”, in: Current Sociology, 68, 1, 22-40.

Ruvituso, Clara (2019): “Sozialwissenschaftliche Lateinamerikaforschung in der BRD“, in: Werz, Nikolaus; Maihold, Günther; Sangmeister, Harmut (eds.) Lateinamerika. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 93-102.

Raquel Rojas is a Researcher at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and a Postdoctoral Investigator at Mecila, where she coordinates the research area Politics of Conviviality. Her research focuses on inequalities and intersectionality, labor relations, and struggles to take care out of the private sphere and make it a matter of public policy. In her project at Mecila, she analyzes the negotiations between different actors involved in debates on care policies and systems in Latin America, asking how their convergences and divergences shape their political projects and affect their ability to work together towards similar goals.

Raquel holds a PhD in Sociology from the FU Berlin, where she was a Doctoral Fellow in the DFG-funded International Research Training Group “Between Spaces. Movements, Actors and Representations of Globalization”, and an MA in Social Sciences from the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is originally from Paraguay, where she earned a degree in Social Development from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) and a BA in Social Sciences from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción, and has been recognized as a Level I researcher by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT-Paraguay) since 2018. She was a Visiting Lecturer (2022-2023) and Postdoctoral Researcher (2021-2022) at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the FU Berlin, and a Mecila Junior Fellow in 2021.

Recent publications

Rojas, Raquel (2023): “Work, Gender and Labor Organizing: Paid Domestic Workers’ Unions in Paraguay”, in Charmain Levy, Laureen Elgert and Valérie L’Heureux (Eds.) Social Movements and Social Change in Paraguay, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 129-153.

Rojas, Raquel (2022): “Another Turn of the Screw: The COVID-19 Crisis and the Reinforced Separation of Capital and Care”, Mecila Working Papers Series No. 48, São Paulo: MECILA.

Rojas, Raquel (2022): “Building Networks, Bridging Divides? Organizational Experiences of Paid Domestic Workers in Uruguay and Paraguay”, in Katja Hujo and Maggie Carter (Eds.) Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: Shifting Power in an Unequal World, London: UNRISD/Bloomsbury Academics, 209-225.

Rojas, Raquel (2022): “Cercanía física, distancia social. Trabajo doméstico remunerado y (des)encuentros en hogares de América Latina”, in Mecila (Ed.) Convivialidad-Desigualdad: explorando los nexos entre lo que nos une y lo que nos separa, Buenos Aires: CLACSO; San Pablo: Mecila, 477-521.

Rojas, Raquel (2021): Same Work, Same Value? Paid Domestic Workers’ and Housewives’ Struggles for Rights in Uruguay and Paraguay. In Current Sociology 69(6), 843-860 (ISSN 0011-3921)

Rojas, Raquel (2021): “Essential yet undervalued. Paid domestic work, migration, and the struggles for labor rights in Uruguay and Paraguay”, in Ximena Alba and Bruno Miranda (Eds.) Migrant Labor in Global Chains, Berlin: Tranvía, 177-200 (ISBN 978-3-946327-28-8)