ZEF-Acting Director Eva Youkhana conducts research on urban issues in Argentina during her sabbatical
ZEF Acting Director Eva Youkhana has been a Research Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CALAS) since mid of December 2022. She will be staying till August 2023 and working in the research group "Coping with the crisis". Her research focuses on different urban topics such as Resistant Assemblages: Housing crisis and resilience in Latin America. She conducts, among other places, research in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires.
More information about Youkhana's stay at CALAS: http://www.calas.lat/en/content/eva-youkhana
Output (selection)
- Lecture at the National Universtiy San Martin, Argentina (UNSAM) on "Counter - Imaginaries in insurgent territories. An anthropological framework to study performance art of the environmental movements in Rosario, Argentina" * (together with Francisco Preiti) **
- Blog post by Eva Youkhana and Francisco Preiti about Illegal arson and civil resistance in Rosario, Argentina.
- Feminist Urbanism: A Participatory Approach of Mapping Diverse Perspectives of Safety and Fear in the Urban Space (together with Cilia Saed-Hedayatiy). Talk at ZEF Gender Group scheduled for September 23, 2023.
About CALAS
The Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) is an academic space dedicated to strengthening transdisciplinary and trans-regional academic cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities between Latin America and Germany.
Financed by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the main headquarters of CALAS are located in Guadalajara (focus on Mexico / North America), and three affiliated regional centers arelocated in Central America (University of Costa Rica, San José), the Andean region (FLACSO, Quito) and the Southern Cone with Brazil (UNSAM, Buenos Aires). In Germany, the universities in Kassel, Jena, Hannover and Bielefeld are affilliated.
CALAS has different research programs working in horizontally organized research groups. In addition to the research groups and transversal axis, CALAS invites senior and junior fellows and hosts researchers from associated institutions who conduct research on CALAS related topics. The individual fellows present their findings in public lectures and are invited to publish their results in CALAS- related publications. More Information on CALAS here.
* Abstract
This article deals with forms of artist protest against the massive fires in the wetlands of the Paraná River delta. Citizens are fighting not only against the unbearable smoke, they are also fighting against the commodification of nature (Svampa, 2014). Around these events, a new wave of social environmentalism (Gutierrez & Isuani, 2014) organizations and actors have been configuring. The environmental movement comprises a variety of heterogeneous actors ranging from citizens, university students, left-wing political groups, conservationist activists, and feminists, who are attracting attention with massive acts of protests by which they express a repertory of new ‘languages of valuation’ (Martinez Alier, 2006). In this essay, we are looking at the artistic forms of protest by Thigra Collective which transgresses the nature/culture duality with their indicial-based (Peirce, 1973; Gell, 2016) signs - artworks and performance actions. By reflecting on Thigra’s performance work we want to show that anti-modern images and meanings are expressed in their artistic interventions by which the group breaks through modern ontologies (Latour, 2001; 2022). In addition, the artists’ work stages the association of human and non-human elements (Latour, 2001) by which they generate an intrusion of objects and performative action in the everyday life of the city.
** Francisco J. Preiti is Profesor de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Becario del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cietníficas y Técnicas, franciscojpreiti(at)hotmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1835-2533
