The central objective of the Latin America Centre at the University of Aarhus is to prepare Danish society for the possible future increase in economic, political, cultural and scientific interactions between Denmark and one of the world’s fastest developing regions. To do so, it is necessary to engage in interdisciplinary research activities related to social, political, cultural and environmental challenges in contemporary Latin America. A secondary objective is thus to create synergy through interdisciplinary collaboration in a bottom-up strategy. It is possible to distinguish between at least two kinds of synergy in this regard. On the one hand, synergy will be achieved between closely related research fields like Area Studies, Anthropology, Law, Political Science and Economics, or between existing advanced research projects represented within the centre, such as four mutually related research projects. On the other hand, synergy will result from the concrete problems raised by the implementation of such projects in Latin America, where each project is confronted with a great variety of questions of a political, economic, legal, cultural and linguistic character. A series of themes or areas of interdisciplinary research will serve to create a clear-cut research framework for the centre’s interdisciplinary activities in this regard.
LACUA's main interdisciplinary research themes
Keywords: Cultural semantics and pragmatics in Latin America
Research areas include foreign and second language pedagogy, with a particular focus on intercultural semantics and pragmatics, grammar teaching and teacher cognition. She also conducts research in various aspects of Spanish linguistics. She is PI for the Velux-funded research project "When Danish is Made. Intercultural Pragmatics in the Teaching of Danish as a Second Language".
Keywords: Languages in contact in South America, Sociolinguistics, Postcolonial linguistics and Glottopolitics.
Research interest centers around the linguistic and cultural contact in the border cities between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, that has led to the contact language portuñol.
Keywords: Brazil, Urban, Culture, Music, Portuguese, Anthropology
His research has been concentrated in São Paulo, Brazil, and has focused on how individuals and community groups, often marginal in status, create visibility in urban conditions through expressive culture, including music, vernacular language, and spatial networking. It employs qualitative methods, such as participatory observation, informal interviews, photography, and story elicitation. His latest book, Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Bloomsbury, 2021), is a collection of short stories based on ethnographic experience and an interpretation of song lyrics from the eponymous album by the legendary Brazilian rap group Racionais MCs.
Keywords: Resource extraction, El Salvador, Central America, Ideology
Research interests include socio-economic impacts and governance of non-renewable resource extraction in the Arctic, Latin America and the South Pacific. Since 2019, He has been involved in a project titled “Surviving Historical Memory in El Salvador”. His latest publication is a chapter in a book titled “Ideology, Post-ideology and Anti-Ideology in Latin America” published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Keywords: memory, activism, artistic practices, urban interventions, demonumentalisation
His research is primarily positioned within the field of cultural memory studies with a special interest in theory on aesthetics, political theory, decolonial theory, social movement theory and performance studies. He currently serves on the steering committee of the UPAST Memory and Heritage Centre at Aarhus University and co-chair the Memory Studies Association’s Memory and Activism Working Group. He is also a partner in Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies.
Keywords: Applied research-creation across Latin America and Europe
She is passionate about learning how making art together with others affect us in such a way that we open up to them, even if they are different, even if they come from other countries, and in this opening up we become more empathetic, we love each other, we accept each other, we pamper each other and create community bonds. In the research project Transforming Migration by Arts (TransMigrARTS), funded by the European Union, She co-create artistic workshops with migrant people in Colombia, France, Spain and Denmark, with the intention of creating a network of researchers in Spanish and implementing the methodology of applied research-creation in our universities.
Keywords: Experimental ethnography, Science and Technology Studies research, fiction, Cuba
Filmmaker, video artist, and associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology who works at the intersection of cinema, contemporary art, and ethnographic research. Entwining experimental ethnography, Science and Technology Studies research, and fiction, his moving-image work engages with alternative infrastructures and strategies of survival and resistance in today’s uneven sociotechnical landscapes. His video and installation projects often appropriate emerging technologies and draw on the aesthetics of DIY networks or the narrative strategies of online video games.
PhD researcher in Humanities and Social Sciences at Université Paris 8 and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, currently a Visiting PhD Scholar at Aarhus University. His work sits at the intersection of Memory Studies, Cultural Analysis and political communication, with a particular focus on the role of difference and social cohesion in transitional contexts. Alongside his research, he has held professional roles at FAO and IOM – UN Migration, working on knowledge management and communication in international development contexts.
