Date/Time: Friday 8th September 2017 09:00-17:00

Venue: Research Beehive 2.22, Old Library Building

Organisers: Dr Matthew C. Benwell (Newcastle University), Dr Andrés Núñez (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and Dr Cordelia Freeman (University of Nottingham) 

This one-day seminar aims to bring together researchers across the social sciences (Human Geography, Sociology, Area Studies, Politics, International Relations, Anthropology etc.) undertaking work on what we might broadly conceive of as everyday geopolitics in Latin America. Inspired by the work of feminist scholars at the turn of the 21st century (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001; Secor, 2001), critical geopolitics has increasingly taken an interest in the grounded, everyday, embodied and emotional encounters that citizens can have with geopolitics. This is in stark contrast to its disciplinary traditions that had seen geopolitics focus exclusive attention on the 'elite' practices, territorial ambitions and discourses of states and their practitioners. Indeed, in the context of Latin America (and most especially the Southern Cone), geopolitical scholarship, arguably, continues to suffer from the legacies of its association with military dictatorships that blighted the region in the second half of the 20th century. For this reason, grounded and everyday perspectives of geopolitics in the region are especially timely and important, serving to challenge these masculinist, militaristic and elite renderings of geopolitics. 

As seminar organisers, our approach to undertaking geopolitical research is committed to acknowledging citizens as actors who experience, (dis)engage, accept and contest geopolitics in a range of different ways. Our research interests inform the seminar’s central themes and questions. These explore the everyday geopolitics and biopolitics of the Chile-Peru border (Freeman); environmental and geopolitical conflicts in Patagonia in both Argentina and Chile (Núñez); and the everyday geopolitics and territorial nationalisms of the South Atlantic and Antarctica in Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas (Benwell).

Researching everyday geopolitics in Latin America Programme

For more information please contact Matthew Benwell