Sophie Esch

Statement

What I like most about LASA is that it brings different academias together: Latin American academia,  U.S. academia, and European acadamia. The recent LASA Asia and LASA Africa congresses are other crucial steps for increasing South-South dialogues and comparisons. As a scholar trained in Germany, Mexico, and the United States and interested in South-South and South-North connections and solidarities these possibilities of dialogue excite me. At the same time, I feel that it is time for LASA to return to its interdisciplinary core. Too often now, the panels are divided into anthropology, political science, or literature panels and depending on one’s discipline, one can have entirely different conference and panel experiences. I would like to see more truly interdisciplinary panels and more intellectual dialogue at LASA again. My first LASA was in 2013 when I went there as a graduate student, mesmerized by seeing so many names that I only knew from having read their books in person and by the electric energy of the gathering. I think the true challenge facing LASA post-pandemic is how to again achieve this vibrancy in a world of spiraling costs, questions of accessibility and obstacles to encounter, hybrid technologies (that bring together but also keep apart), and very legitimate concerns about the financial and environmental costs of academic conferencing. I will not say that I have the answers to all these questions but that I, should I be selected to the executive council, would focus my attention and interventions on the question of intellectual vibrancy and accessibility of the congress:

1) Experimenting with other formats than panels (e.g. seminars that meet every day or book forums that discuss one or several books between authors and commentators; writers, artists, activists as keynote speakers) to increase and deepen intellectual dialogue;

2) Increasing interdisciplinary dialogues as well as South-North and South-South dialogues within panels, across the program and the association;

3) Working towards increasing in-person congress participation (e.g. travel grants) and hopefully moving away from a hybrid congress towards an in-person only congress again, preferably in Latin America and if possible, not at big (resort) hotels but universities or, if necessary, convention centers; combined with online gathering options throughout the year;

As an executive council member, I would also like to give continuity to important work that has happened within LASA in recent years in relation to: a) deepening the LASA activities with and in Africa and Asia; and b) thinking about Latin America, “Améfrica Ladina” or Abya Yala in a capacious, pluricultural manner and centering otros sáberes and Indigenous and Afro-Latin American studies.