Dear Members of the International Research Training Group ‘Between Spaces’ and those interested in the IRTG,

With this, the seventh issue of the IRTG ‘Between Spaces’ Newsletter, we would like to inform you about our news and current events. We hope that everyone had a great, refreshing and inspiring summer.

 

News from the Coordination Office

We would like to thank Diana Grothues, who has been working for the IRTG for two years and whose contract expires this October, for her good work, commitment and engagement. As Diana will also be completing her studies, she will now strike out on new paths, on which we would like to wish her all the best. In our next Newsletter, we hope to be able to give you the name and more details about the new student assistant in the Coordination Office who, as Diana’s successor, will be responsible mainly for the organisation of our programme and events.

 

New scholarship holder

We are very pleased to welcome as a new member of the IRTG Kevin Niebauer. Kevin works as a historian on the Brazilian environmental movement and is currently completing his MA thesis. The scholarship will give him the opportunity to prepare his doctoral dissertation.

 

Reports on events of recent months

International Summer School ‘Between Spaces. Movements, Actors and Representations of Globalisation’, June 27 to July 1, 2011

Report of campus.leben:

Summer School 2011

Report of Montserrat Algarabel (former CIESAS PhD student):

The Summer School of the IRTG 2011 realised one of its main goals: to become a genuinely transnational space in which professors and students alike can be enriched by discussion of both their research projects and personal experiences.

For a week at Logenhaus in Berlin, our International Research Training Group ‘Between Spaces. Movements, Actor and Representations of Globalisation’ gathered together more than fifty participants from Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and the United States, whose fields of study included sociology, anthropology, literary studies, history, economics and political science. We discussed Master’s and PhD projects in thematic workshops where different perspectives came together and keynote speakers such as Sebastian Conrad, Gerardo Esquivel Hernández, Peggy Levitt, Walter Mignolo, Karl Schlögel, and Lynn Stephen found an eager and participative audience, whose questions and comments succeeded in generating a fruitful intellectual exchange.

During the workshops, students were able to present freely their research findings, a constructive, if difficult, experience. As a Mexican PhD student, it was very interesting for me to see how my work was interpreted by researchers who live oceans apart, but are very close in terms of commitment and support. Moreover, lectures such as those by Karl Schlögel and Peggy Levitt provided thought-provoking insights into some of today’s leading academic thinkers. In their discussions of the various links between time and space in historiography and the understanding of culture in motion, these lectures helped develop my own research process by introducing new perspectives that proved useful both analytically and methodologically.

In sum, the Summer School 2011 was a stimulating opportunity to meet and greet fellow researchers and, most importantly, receive feedback and inspiration in the difficult task of completing a graduate dissertation.

 

Workshop about atlas.ti, with Agnes Mühlmeyer-Mentzel, August 25, 2011

Report of Marius Haberland (IRTG Berlin):

In qualitative research we are confronted with a variety of challenges. One of these challenges is the analysis of data gathered during fieldwork. In order to better organise our interview and text analysis, qualitative data analysis software can be very helpful. Especially helpful for inductive approaches is the programme ‘atlas.ti’.

As an introduction to this programme, together with Agnes Mühlmeyer-Mentzel we organised a one-day workshop on August 25. In the first part of the workshop we got to know how the programme works, and in the second part we started to use the programme to analyse our own data. The workshop provided the participants with new tools for the analysis of their data and thus helped to advance their PhD projects.

 

Alumni report

Report of Lilia Esthela Bayardo Rodríguez (IRTG Mexico) about her stay at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin (June – July 2011)

I wanted to use my stay at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin and at the Ibero-American Institute to advance research on my dissertation project, ‘The Dimensions of Mexican Consumption, 1914-1970, supervised by Prof. Dr. Marcello Carmagnani.

I hoped to find literature on the analysis of consumption from a global perspective, to establish contact with other researchers and to benefit from feedback. My stay in Berlin was very profitable for me and fulfilled my three main aims:

a) review of the literature that could provide a better understanding of the concept of ‘modern consumption’ from a global perspective, with a concentration on other Latin American countries such as Peru and Argentina and their similarities to Mexico;

b) access to Brazilian and Argentine publications that treated my subject from an anthropological perspective and which could not be found in Mexico; and

c) feedback from professors and colleagues from diverse institutions during the International Summer School in the last week of June 2011. Their comments covered the following areas: suggestions about sources in the area of advertising for my cultural analysis, about the bibliography, about ‘sub-perioding’ my project and about taking account of peculiarities of Mexican economy, politics and culture. Thanks to these helpful suggestions, I was able (among other things) to refine the methodology of my quantitative analysis.

My stay in Berlin was very rewarding and helped me to reflect better on many areas of my project.

 

AHILA 2014

Stefan Rinke and the IRTG are very pleased to announce that the IRTG, together with the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin, will organise the coming Conference of AHILA (Association of European Historians Researching Latin America) in Berlin in September 2014.

Stefan Rinke and Ingrid Simson presented a proposal for the organisation of the Conference during the last Conference of AHILA in San Fernando, Spain, which was accepted. The title of the Conference will be ‘Between Spaces: Latin American History in a Global Context’. The Conference will afford an excellent opportunity for the members of the IRTG and other interested persons to meet in Berlin. Contributions are welcome!

Cooperation between the IRTG Berlin/Potsdam and the Institute of Latin American Studies and Centre for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University, New York

We are happy to announce that the planning of a Bilateral Exchange Programme for Doctoral and Postdoctoral students between the Institute of Latin American Studies and Centre for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University, New York, and the IRTG ‘Between Spaces’ at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin will soon be concluded. This programme will enable scholarship holders of the IRTG Berlin/Potsdam to spend some months at the Institute of Latin American Studies of Columbia University, and PhD students and postdoctoral students from Columbia to spend some time at the IRTG Berlin/Potsdam. There are also plans for meetings and the collaboration of scholars. In addition, the IRTG was successful in securing funding for the first year of the cooperation from the Centre of International Cooperation (CIC) of the Freie Universität Berlin.

 

Nina Elsemann: PhD thesis published

We are very pleased to inform you of the publication of Nina Elsemann’s PhD thesis Umkämpfte Erinnerungen. Die Bedeutung lateinamerikanischer Erfahrungen für die spanische Geschichtspolitik nach Franco. Nina Elsemann was the first PhD student and scholarship holder at the IRTG Berlin to complete her doctoral thesis.

Further information on the book may be found here (in German):

 

Events in the coming months

IN BERLIN/POTSDAM:

Interdisciplinary Colloquium

This semester the Interdisciplinary Colloquium has a new design. Scholarship holders will give presentations every fortnight. Meeting in work groups, they will discuss specific topics in their specialties, each other fortnight.

 

October 18, 6 – 8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 201

Adrian Waldmann, “La reinvención de una clase alta en la cultura del consumo cruceña”

Thilo Papacek, "Projects for the Colonisation of the Chaco. Comparing Bolivian and Paraguayan Spatial Concepts from a Transnational Perspective"

Guests are welcome. Please register at entre-espacios@lai.fu-berlin.de

 

October 25, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 201

Meeting of work groups

The meetings are closed and not open to the public

 

November 1, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 201

Tabea Huth, "High Flights, Blasts and (Un)wanted Kisses: Ruby Gardenia and lucha libre

exótica in Tijuana"

Nino Vallen, "Re-Orienting Expansion: The 'American' Quest in the Pacific (1513-1565)"

Guests are welcome. Please register at entre-espacios@lai.fu-berlin.de

 

November 8, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 201

Meeting of work groups

The meetings are closed and not open to the public

 

November 29, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 201

Paulina Soto, “El cuerpo pasionario de las beatas de Nueva España”

Marius Haberland, "A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Transnational Protest in Mexico/Central America"

Guests are welcome. Please register at entre-espacios@lai.fu-berlin.de

 

The full programme of the Interdisciplinary Colloquium is available here.

 

Lecture Series (Ringvorlesung)

The aim of the lecture series this semester is to invite associated and other scholars interested in the IRTG to give lectures that will enable us to gain a better understanding of their research priorities and their work.

 

November 3, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 201

Oscar Ugarteche (UNAM), “The Latin American and the European debt: A tale of two continents”

 

November 24, 6-8 pm, Main entrance of the Ethnological Museum, Lansstr. 8

Viola König (Ethnological Museum), “Cartographic Communication, Spatial Order and its Presentation in Precolumbian Mexico and the Early Colonial Time”

 

The full programme of the meetings of the lecture series is available here.

 

Film Meetings

This semester the IRTG again offers the opportunity to present and discuss films on Wednesday evening. Since some dates are still free, we ask interested parties who wish to present a film to get in touch with Saranda. The full programme of the Film Meetings is available here.

 

November 9, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 243

Film También la lluvia, presented by Adrian Waldmann

 

November 16, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 243

Film Los últimos Zapatistas – Héroes olvidados, presented by Christian Ambrosius

 

November 23, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 243

Film El secreto de sus ojos, presented by the IRTG

 

November 30, 6-8 pm, Institute for Latin American Studies, room 243

Documentary film El oro o la vida – recolonización y Resistencia en Centroamérica, presented by Marius Haberland

 

Workshop with Janina Möbius: Film about the IRTG

In the coming semester, the IRTG plans a workshop with the film director Janina Möbius in order to create a short film about the IRTG ‘Between Spaces’. We would like to encourage doctoral and postdoctoral students to join the workshop. We ask those interested to contact us at entre-espacios@lai.fu-berlin.de

 

Other Activities

We would like to draw your attention to two conferences that might be of interest to you.

 

October 26-28, Institute for Latin American Studies

‘Trans/mission europea-indígena: Estrategias de traduccion en América Latina colonial’

 

October 27-29, Institute for Latin American Studies

‘Brazil in Global Context’

Information and programme may be found here.

 

IN MEXICO:

Inter-institutional Colloquium

The inter-institutional Colloquium of the IRTG Mexico has a new format in this academic year. There will be four meetings of the Colloquium at IRTG participating institutions. They will present and discuss important texts that have been selected by the applicants and associate professors. Approximately one hour is estimated for the presentation and discussion. The meetings are open to Mexican and German scholarship holders of the IRTG. All participants are expected to read the relevant texts in advance of the meetings to ensure a fruitful discussion. The texts may be found on Blackboard. In addition, two further meetings of the Colloquium are planned at which scholarship holders can present their projects. At each meeting three scholarship holders will have the opportunity to present their research.

 

November 11, 4-8 pm, Colegio de México

The following texts will be presented and discussed:

* Carlos Sempat Assadourian (1982), El sistema de la economía colonial. Mercado interno, regiones y espacio económico, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Perú, pp. 277-339.

* Pernilla S. Rafiqui (2009), ‘Evolving Economic Landscapes: Why New Institutional Economics Matters for Economic Geography’, in: Journal of Economic Geography 9, pp. 329–353.

* Walter D. Mignolo (2000), Local Histories/Global designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton Press, chapter ‘Border Thinking’, pp. 49-88 and chapter ‘Afterword: An Other Logic’, pp. 313-338.

The first text will be presented by Bernd Hausberger (COLMEX), the second by Carlos Riojas (CUECA/UdeG), and the third by Marisa Belausteguigoitia (PUEG/UNAM).

 

The full programme of the sessions of the Inter-institutional Colloquium is available here.

 

For more information on our programme and activities, please consult our website: www.entre-espacios.de

 

Best wishes,

Ingrid Simson and her team