Collective memories, human rights and resistance

Summary: In Latin America, the concept of collective memory has been linked to reflection on the political violence of the wars, armed conflicts, and military dictatorships of recent decades. Confronting these violent pasts has led to the development of memory policies, understood both as state policies and as political actions undertaken by social organizations or political groups involved in remembering the political conflicts experienced in their local contexts. We will examine some emblematic cases in our region, such as Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.

We will examine how, in the current contexts of different regions and countries in Latin America, diverse resistance practices in the face of exploitation, dispossession, wealth concentration, and public and private violence draw upon a collective memory that recovers the various forms of knowledge from political struggle, transforming itself into an active memory. In the global context, resistance movements tend to be local. We will review and analyze resistance experiences in Mexico and in the Andean highlands of Peru, Argentina, and Chile.

The critical analysis of memory policies implemented in different Latin American countries leads us to argue that, despite significant contributions to understanding the authoritarian processes, dictatorships, and political transitions in the region, as well as confronting and elaborating on the consequences these have had on society and individuals, the challenge remains of understanding, decoding, or establishing links with the new socio-political realities developing in the region, in which new and old forms of political violence and resistance are articulated.

However, analyzing experiences of resistance in which memory is transformed into a political resource to act in the present will help us rethink memory as an agent that contributes to transformation.

Coordination: Isabel Piper (University of Chile)

Summary: The course addresses the relationship between gender and memory, emphasizing two ways of understanding this connection: first, understanding collective memory as constructed by gendered subjects, and second, exploring different feminist approaches present in this field of study. From this perspective, we analyze the memories constructed by activists, guerrillas, victims, and other social actors in relation to their gendered positions in both the present and the past; as well as the continuities and discontinuities of gender roles and dynamics that occurred in significant events they recount.

Through these analyses, we aim to examine counter-memory exercises (Arfuch, 2013; Luongo, 2013) or subaltern memories that emphasize themes and perspectives little explored in hegemonic narratives: for example, visualizing how gender structures are destabilized or preserved in the construction of these memories, or how hybrid processes of affectivity, political action, and resistance are structured when remembering certain events and contexts. This is because we understand that the subjects of memories are multi-positional agents who are linked through events/spaces (Zalaquet, 2011).

Finally, the course will analyze various studies of collective memory from Ibero-American countries that precisely incorporate a gender perspective into the understanding of the processes of collective memory construction, either to make visible experiences -of victimization and/or political resistance- that have been silenced by a hegemonic, masculinized, and heterosexist memory, or to establish gendered understandings of the past through a critical reading of the ways in which different episodes are narrated from the present.

Coordination: Marisela Montenegro (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Caterine Galaz (University of Chile)

Summary: The objective of this course is to bring into dialogue the processes of collective memory and migrations, with the aim of illuminating new facets that allow us to better understand the complexity of each, in a context of globalization and advanced capitalism.

In this sense, we will address the particular nuances of issues considered fundamental by memory studies, such as places and commemorations; the disputes between official and unofficial memories; and museification and heritage preservation. This will be done with the aim of examining dynamics such as memories without a place and the "non-place" of migrations; the challenge to imaginaries of exclusion and the limits of belonging; and cultural initiatives as alternatives for managing political tensions, their conflictive nature, and also their potential.

We will also examine issues that are gaining prominence in the study of contemporary migrations, such as diaspora and transnational spaces; migrant subjectivity and the impacts of mobility regimes on its development. This will allow us to analyze the tension surrounding national boundaries as contours of collective memory; and the potential of memories and counter-memories in shaping resistance to subordination and articulating relationships based on difference (Braidotti, 2006) during migrant trajectories.

Coordination: Belén Rojas - University of Utrecht, Netherlands)

Summary: The course reflects on the genealogy, transformation, and analytical possibilities of the category of disappearance. It has been used to describe cases in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in the 70s, in Mexico and Colombia today, and, looking further back, in the Spanish Civil War, Nazi Germany in the 40s, Khmer Rouge Cambodia in the 70s, and Bosnia during the war in the 90s. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of cases that are referred to as disappearances and missing persons.

Coordination: Gabriel Gatti (University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Summary:  This seminar seeks to reflect on how Latin American societies have confronted their past experiences of political violence—whether dictatorships or internal armed conflicts—during the 20th and 21st centuries, through the memorialization processes undertaken by various social actors. Through this seminar, we will explore the public forms of memory constructed from these violent pasts, analyzing the critical capacity of the memorialization processes deployed in different countries of the region, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay, to interrogate the present of these societies, particularly regarding new forms of violence and current conflicts.

Coordination: Ana Gugliemucci (University of Buenos Aires) and Loreto López (University of Chile)

Summary: This course aims to explore the public uses of the past and the political interpretations of collective memory in order to understand how meanings, practices, and politics of memory and forgetting are constructed in the public sphere by civil society organizations, intellectuals, and state agencies. In this sense, it will describe and analyze—through various empirical cases and at multiple scales—those public uses of the past through which actors have intervened in the past and continue to intervene in the present.

Coordination: Ana María Barletta and Emmanuel Kahan (National University of La Plata, Argentina)

Summary:This course aims to address the memory of history and popular struggles in Latin American aesthetic production in its various forms: in visual arts, popular music, poetry, literature, film and theater.

Coordination:Ana Rüsche (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Brazil)