Felipe Hernández, Peter Kellett and Lea K. Allen (eds.) (2012): Rethinking the Informal City

This review discusses the book 'Rethinking the informal City. Critical perspectives from Latin America', edited by  Felipe Hernández, Peter Kellett and Lea K. Allen from a political science perspective considering broader research on formality, informality and city governance in Latin America

“Nobody has the answer, but we need some map, even to go into the unknown”: A Conversation with Arjun Appadurai on Research, Speculation and Future Thinking

Arjun Appadurai is a cultural- anthropologist born in Mumbai (1949) and based between New York, where he is Paulette Goddard Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and Berlin, where he is currently Mercator Fellow at the International Research Training Group Temporalities of Future in Latin America at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.In this conversation, PhD candidates at the IRTG Elis de Aquino and Luis Kliche address some of the different and diverse themes that occupy Appadurai’s career, from digital capitalism to education, as well as Appadurai’s experience with Latin American researchers and institutions, in an exercise to imagine the possible future horizons at the global and local level.This interview was carried out online in December 2020

Claudia López (2016): ¡Adiós a las FARC! ¿Y ahora qué?: Construir ciudadanía, estado y mercado para unir las tres Colombias

During the last year of the Havana negotiations, she published this book, which is based on her doctoral thesis. In it, López suggests a plan for the post-conflict state building with the following strategies: strengthening the institutional presence of the State, generating local markets that ensure resources for the regions and empowering citizens. The book can then be understood as a detailed evaluation of public policies of pacification, intervention and decentralization between 1982 and 2010, which serves as support for proposing a series of reforms in order to correct the causes that give rise and continuation to the armed conflict

Protagonists of Latin American Futures

In the absence of a coherent and convincing narrative of hope, new protagonists and their solidly responsible forms of imagining and struggling for livable futures enter the stages of parliaments, social media platforms and public spaces in cities around the world. It is precisely such spirit of collective solidarity, facing multiple crises at once, that links indigenous struggles over land and environment with the young people of the climate strike movement, as Brum has it, the “first generation without hope.” This leads to the overarching question of this theme issue: Who are the protagonists of Latin American futures? Who is imagining, writing, narrating such futures – how, when and where? In this CROLAR theme issue, we map protagonists of Latin American futures, both human and non-human, looking at the ways in which they act, create, and think futures