The Latin American Centre at Aarhus University - LACUA opened its 2026 programme with its first gathering of the year, bringing together colleagues from across disciplines: culture and communication, anthropology, linguistics, memory studies, and intercultural studies. The meeting served as both a scholarly forum and a space for collegial renewal at the start of a new semester.
At its core, LACUA functions as a platform for connecting ideas, debates, and issues that emerge from the complex panorama of contemporary Latin America and for examining how that panorama may function as a case study or conceptual framework relevant to the Danish context. This first session embodied that mission, with participants engaging across theoretical traditions and methodological approaches.
Digital networks and grassroots culture in Cuba
The first presentation was delivered by Steffen Köhn, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, whose research brings together ethnographic fieldwork and visual anthropology. Köhn shared work drawn from his forthcoming book, exploring how Cuban society has navigated the constraints and possibilities of digital technology in the post-Castro era.
Köhn's research illuminates how, far from being passive recipients of state-controlled media, Cuban citizens have developed sophisticated, decentralised digital infrastructures that operate at the margins of official communication channels. His ethnographic approach offers a grounded, humanistic counterweight to purely technological accounts of digital culture foregrounding agency, creativity, and everyday resistance. His forthcoming book, Island in the Net: Digital Culture in Post-Castro Cuba, explores Cuba's emerging digital culture and Cubans' creation of grassroots networks, digital black markets, and online spaces for public debate.
Memory, care, and post-conflict communities in Colombia
The second presentation came from Andrés Chaur, Visiting PhD Scholar at Aarhus University's Department of Communication and Culture and co-coordinator at LACUA, whose doctoral research focuses on memory practices, care, and post-conflict narration in rural Colombia.
His research examines the Salón del Nunca Más — the Never Again Museum — in Granada, Antioquia, Colombia, as a site where community memory practices articulate a particular ethics of care in the aftermath of armed conflict. Located in a municipality that suffered devastating violence during Colombia's internal war, the museum was built by survivors, victims' families, and community members as an act of collective witness and civic repair.
The study analyses how the space functions not merely as an archive of atrocity, but as a living repertoire in which community members actively perform, transmit, and transform memory across generations. The research interrogates the temporal tensions embedded in post-conflict memory: how communities simultaneously mourn the past, navigate a fragile present, and project fragile futures.
Theoretically, the project is situated at the intersection of François Hartog's concept of régimes d'historicité temporal regimes that govern how societies relate to past, present, and future and a feminist ethics of care as articulated by scholars such as Joan Tronto and Virginia Held. The argument advanced is that the Salón del Nunca Más enacts what might be called a cuidado de la diferencia: a care for difference that refuses closure, insists on the irreducibility of individual lives lost, and holds open the wound of history not as paralysis but as ethical responsibility to those who come after.
LACUA as a platform for dialogue
Beyond the individual presentations, the meeting reaffirmed LACUA's broader purpose: to serve as a sustained, multidisciplinary hub where researchers working on Latin American themes from diverse theoretical traditions and at different stages of their careers can share work, challenge one another's assumptions, and build intellectual community.
The centre also explores how Latin American cases, frameworks, and histories can speak productively to questions that matter in the Danish and broader Scandinavian context: from migration and interculturality to digital sovereignty, transitional justice, and community resilience. This bidirectional dialogue between Global South scholarship and northern European perspectives is central to LACUA's identity.
Future sessions will continue to foreground this multidisciplinary spirit, with presentations and workshops spanning linguistics, visual culture, political economy, literature, and anthropology. Researchers interested in engaging with LACUA's programme are warmly encouraged to reach out.
