EventSummer School: Socio-Political Impacts of the Covid Pandemic in Latin America and Europe
26 July 2022
Event for master’s students and doctoral candidates taking place at Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies
Pandemic-related processes of socio-political transformation in the countries of Latin America and Europe are the topic of a summer school being held by the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS) at Heidelberg University until 2 August 2022. The interdisciplinary event is primarily addressed to master’s students and doctoral candidates in the social sciences and humanities. The participants are dealing – from a transnational perspective – with the social and political changes triggered by the pandemic worldwide. The summer school is being conducted in close cooperation with the Heidelberg Center Latin America (HCLA), the university’s branch in Santiago de Chile, and is financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Under the heading “Critical Junctures and Windows of Opportunity for (Post-) Pandemic Societies in Europe and Latin America (JUNCTURES_2022)”, the summer school consists of seminars, workshops and panel discussions run by the academics at the HCIAS and experts from Germany and abroad. It is the second event of this kind that has emerged from the close scholarly cooperation between the HCIAS and the HCLA. After Santiago de Chile, the international summer school, with a total of 20 participants, is now taking place in Heidelberg. “Together we are building a bridge between our two institutions in order to foster scholarly dialogue between Latin America and Heidelberg and create sustainable international networks that enable excellent joint research, teaching and knowledge transfer on, with and in Ibero-America. Stemming as they do from this close cooperation, the summer schools contribute to further intensifying these efforts,” underlines Prof. Dr Francisco Moreno-Fernández, HCIAS director.
The Covid pandemic can in many ways be considered a watershed; it further exacerbated polarisation and inequality, but also opened up new opportunities for initiating processes of societal, economic and ecological change, says Junior Professor Dr Alejandro Ecker from the HCIAS, who is in charge of the summer school’s academic programme. Against this background, the participants, most of whom are students and doctoral candidates from Latin America, will explore questions around the socio-political misdevelopments that have followed from the pandemic and the potential for renewal it has made visible. With respect to the societies in Latin America and Europe, participants will, for example, look at which institutional structures counteract polarisation and inequality, what influence language and identity have and how modern technologies can be used to respond to current developments.