MECILA-CALAS Roundtable

Date: 04/10/2024, 14h
Place: CEBRAP, São Paulo

The Maria Sibylla Merian Centers’ consortium model, integrating regional and German institutions, fosters unique opportunities for collaborative knowledge production. This partnership, focused on addressing multiscale crises, hinges on institutional transparency, researcher trust, and administrative adaptability. The Latin America-Germany collaboration, exemplified by Mecila and CALAS, facilitates profound reflection and cooperation, notwithstanding significant disparities, particularly in a challenging global context. Concurrently, South-South relationships among nations like Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina offer distinctive comparative analyses, addressing specific territorial contradictions through an interregional lens enhanced by German collaboration. These interactions benefit from interdisciplinary approaches that expand scholarly discourse by incorporating peripheral experiences and novel epistemological frameworks. The centers’ core themes, including conviviality, inequality, and crisis, provide a conceptual framework that valorizes diverse perspectives and multi-level analytical collaboration. The Roundtable will examine both centers’ experiences, structures, and practices, exploring broader implications for international academic cooperation between Latin America and Germany.

 Program

14h00: Welcome Address – Bianca Tavolari, Mecila Director

14h15: Roundtable Discussion
Susanne Klengel (Mecila, Freie Universität)
Peter Schulze (Mecila, Universität zu Köln)
Jaime Preciado Coronado (CALAS, Universidad de Guadalajara)
Christine Hatzky (CALAS, Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Jochen Kemner (CALAS Academic Manager)
Christina Peters (DFG Office Latin America )
Georg Wink (University of Copenhagen)

Chair: Sérgio Costa (Mecila PI and Representative, Freie Universität Berlin)

15h45 General discussion

17h00 End of the event