The main question of this Working Group (WG) – Latin American Studies: National, Regional, and Transnational Perspectives – can be expressed as follows: What is the past, present, and future of the field of Latin American Studies (LAS) in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in relation to regional and global contexts and the changes and main debates in the social sciences and humanities from the beginning of the 20th century to the present? A brief review of LAS programs at universities reveals a marked interest in this thematic area, as it includes subjects, areas, and periods for the undergraduate and graduate training of historians, literary scholars, and the entire range of disciplines that comprise the social sciences. Therefore, not only its existence but also its functioning are relevant to the training of professionals in these areas. We are dealing with a relevant disciplinary field for the different university structures in LAC and other regions.

To critically situate the topic of study in the Latin American and Caribbean context and in relation to global dynamics, we propose to consider it in four possible axes.

1. The changes in the global and regional political context at the beginning of the 20th century, with the emergence of North American hegemony in the Caribbean and Central America, and its subsequent globalization after World War II during the Cold War, are fundamental to understanding the diverse contexts through which Latin America has passed. The current post-Cold War period represents the latest phase, where this hegemony is being contested. At the global level, the reorganization of the academic field during the era of neoliberal capitalist globalization and its impact on the reorganization of the humanities and social sciences in terms of funding, agendas, and working conditions are significant. In the regional context, the crises caused by the application of the neoliberal model and its counterpart of social, political, and intellectual struggles have been the stage for a renewed academic and political interest in understanding and analyzing the national histories and problems of Latin American and Caribbean countries within the regional and global context with which they interact and are connected. At the beginning of the 21st century, Latin America as a region gained relevance in international politics through unprecedented regional integration initiatives, the likes of which had not been seen since the beginning of the 19th-century independence process. However, the new political landscape, marked by a "turn to the right" in the region, opens up new challenges in understanding the configuration of relationships between knowledge and politics (Falero, Charles, Soler, 2016).

2. The second axis is the need to create academic collaboration networks at the national, regional, and transnational levels to understand the past, present, and future of the agenda of problems and objects of study within the interdisciplinary field of knowledge that constitutes ELA (Economic and Social Studies). We still lack research that systematically analyzes the past and present of the ELA field in Latin American and Caribbean countries—that is, the changes, ruptures, and continuities in its objects of study, its questions, its methodologies, and its multiple temporalities and scales of analysis. From a long-term historical perspective, the development of the ELA field in Latin American and Caribbean countries appears as a process of multiple intellectual operations that, since the 19th century, led first to the construction of the imagined community (Anderson, 1989) "Latin America" ​​(Feres Junior, 2004; Rouquié, 1998) and subsequently to the formation of a disciplinary community toward the mid-20th century. This process can be traced in the initiatives of Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals who built different genealogies of thought, from interests, subjectivities and memories situated in their own local histories (Mignolo, 2007), on national and regional scales, always in dialogue with other regions of the world.

In the early decades of the 20th century, faced with increasing US interference in Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America (Zinn, 2006; Gaztambide, 2003), these regional intellectual traditions adopted the pursuit of regional proximity and integration as a specific mission. The next stage or generation saw the formation of an academic community derived from this intellectual and cultural tradition specific to Latin American countries. This community was now viewed as an area of ​​study encompassing the humanities, primarily literary studies, philosophy, and history, as well as the social sciences. From the 1940s onward, one can speak of the beginning of disciplinary professionalization embedded within higher education institutions, mainly universities and research institutes. It was within this sphere that the disciplinary community known as Latin American Studies (ELA) developed over the following decades, depending on the country, within the context of the global and inter-American Cold War. From then on, two traditions and several tensions surrounding the articulation of ELA can be distinguished. The two traditions have been in dispute over the objectives and methods that define them as an interdisciplinary thematic field. On the one hand, there is the legacy of an intellectual history based on the imagined community, which was able to construct one of the traditions in this field, such as the history of ideas that expanded from Mexico and created the first network of these studies. From there derives the school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which achieved strong institutionalization by the 1960s and 70s. The other tradition is that of area studies, created in the heat of the Cold War in the United States, Western Europe, and countries of the socialist bloc, with a practical and utilitarian aim: to generate specialized knowledge for foreign policy decision-making. In the case of the United States, since then, Area Studies has been subject to the political urgencies of the region and its relationship to the specific geopolitical context of the Inter-American Cold War, particularly after the Cuban Revolution.

3. The third key aspect for understanding this topic is the need for a debate on the relationship between Area Studies and the evolution and changes in the paradigms that underpin the social sciences and humanities, and how these changes have impacted interdisciplinarity, the foundation of area studies in general. From this perspective, the historical conditions of the changing global, Latin American, and Caribbean context compel us to consider new scenarios and questions regarding Area Studies in the region. Therefore, it is urgent to begin systematizing studies that will help us understand the purpose of the interdisciplinary community in light of these shifts in the historical expectations of the entire region, which affect how area studies, and specifically Area Studies, are currently constructed and articulated.

4. The fourth axis of analysis for situating the research topic is the question of the levels of institutionalization of Local Academic Entities (LAEs), their regional and international coordination, and their agendas. In recent decades, significant institutional development of LAEs has been observed in some Latin American and Caribbean countries, with key indicators being the quantitative and qualitative evolution of research lines, publications, and graduate programs. This was the result of an international movement of initiatives for the academic institutionalization of LAEs since the beginning of the 21st century. This is evident in the proliferation of research centers and institutes, thematic universities (such as the University of

The ELA (Ecological and Social Studies) can be defined as a field comprised of the set of social and humanistic disciplines that work interdisciplinarily in the study of specific problems of the region in its contemporary and present stage (Sosa Álvarez, 2007). In contrast to disciplinary fields that form dense communities of specialists, the ELA forms communities of specialists from diverse disciplines with a wide range of topics and problems, analytical approaches, and methodologies. Supported by a socio-historical perspective of the different countries and realities that make up the region, they propose to critically understand the history of the continent from their own perspective; to bring together different disciplines with convergent or similar themes and objects; and to bring together different social realities and national contexts around common problems (Novion, Oliver, Ayala, 2014).

The evolution of the Latin American Studies (LAS) disciplinary community in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) began within the context of the growing internationalization of the social sciences and humanities during the Cold War (1945-1991). This necessitates studying its national and regional developments from perspectives that address the process by considering its transnational and global interactions. In this sense, it will be important to explore the dialogues and interactions among the different LAS developments within the context of the Global Cold War, while also taking into account the debates that have accompanied area and comparative studies since its end (Basedau and Köllner, 2007). For these reasons, the research conducted within the framework of the Working Group will consider the global context in which Latin American Studies emerged as an area of ​​study in the United States and Western Europe, as well as in countries of the socialist bloc.

Currently, there are critical studies on how Latin American Studies developed in countries such as the United States (Chicote, 2018), Great Britain (Miller, 2018), Germany (Puhle, 2018), the Netherlands (Baud, 2018), the USSR (Bartley, 2018), and China (Xianglin and Huiye, 2018). These works agree that Latin American and Caribbean studies received a decisive boost during the Cold War. In academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and the socialist bloc, these programs were created by the political imperatives of the two contending superpowers, which had consequences for research agendas. In the United States and Europe, their beginnings as a field of study were strongly linked to the triad of universities, governments, and foundations, until the 1960s when a new generation of Latin Americanists was influenced by the political and social processes in Latin America (Chicote, 2018). In contrast, for Latin American and Caribbean countries, we still lack systematic research on the origins and development of Latin American Studies (LAS). However, we have seen uneven progress depending on the discipline and country—for example, in Brazil (Beired, 2005), Mexico (Sosa Álvarez, 2007), Argentina (Águila 2011, 2012; Bohoslavsky, Geoghegan, and González, 2011; Ayala, 2018)—and efforts to articulate a comprehensive regional vision—for example, Acosta, Ansaldi, Giordano, and Soler, 2015; Colloquium on Latin American Studies in the 21st Century, 2018—which will form the basis for discussion of the Working Group's lines of work.

In dialogue with these studies, our interest as a Working Group will be to analyze the dialectical development dynamics of Local Economic and Social Affairs (LEA) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), considering, on the one hand, national and regional developments that can offer alternative perspectives, and, on the other hand, perspectives constructed (and often imposed) from global centers, whose agendas generally do not align with those of LAC countries. At the same time, there is still no international network capable of articulating a systematic, regional, comparative, and transnational research project on this topic. All of this occurs within an international academic context that places Latin American social sciences and humanities before the challenge of transnational and global shifts in the modes of historical analysis and interpretation.

Bearing in mind the context, debates, and gaps in knowledge and academic articulation mentioned above, this Working Group proposes to focus its three-year plan on four lines of work related to the field of knowledge of Latin American Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean:

1. Study and analysis of the emergence and development of ELAs in ALyC. From a socio-historical perspective, this line of work will focus on the historical comparison of the idea of ​​Latin America from the last third of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, with the intention of highlighting the historical operations that led to the construction of the imagined community "Latin America" ​​from the different countries and regions.

2. Reconstruction and analysis of the current situation of ELA (Economic and Social Studies) in the social sciences and humanities of Latin American and Caribbean countries from national, comparative, regional, and transnational historical perspectives between the beginning of the 20th century and the present. Its results will provide a transnational interpretation of the diverse scales and circulations of knowledge production about Latin America and the Caribbean as units of analysis.

3. Theory and methodology in ELA. This axis proposes to analyze the field of ELA from a methodological proposal centered on five issues: a) the socio-historical perspectives of analysis; b) interdisciplinary work; c) comparative studies; d) transnational and global scales of analysis; and e) the search for the production of critical knowledge on problems of the macro-region that contribute to transforming its realities.

4. To build an academic collaboration network, working internationally based on three lines of action: a) to develop and implement a systematic, regional, comparative and transnational research project on ELA; b) to increase inter-institutional cooperation and coordination among its different nodes in the areas of research, teaching (undergraduate and postgraduate), extension, transfer, publications, professional training and public policy advice; c) to seek greater coordination and exchanges with the work of other CLACSO Working Groups.

Based on its working guidelines, this Working Group aims to foster dialogue and exchange among specialists in the field of Local Autonomous Environments (LAEs) in Latin America and the Caribbean. This will be achieved through various in-person and virtual meetings of its members to discuss research and advances and contribute to a shared understanding of LAEs from national, regional, and transnational perspectives. In this process, dialogue between established and emerging researchers will contribute to the development of human resources in this area.