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.