Academics and policy makers often take Latin America for granted as a clearly defined and culturally coherent region of the world. For many, this stems from the economic, political, and cultural ties that date back to the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial periods. But the concept of Latin America is a modern one that emerged from nineteenth-century debates over statecraft and was modeled on old world divisions between Anglo/Teutonic Europe on the one hand and Latin Europe on the other. In many ways, this imposition fit quite poorly in the Americas. With its astounding diversity (ethnic, geographical, economic, political, and otherwise), Latin America defies easy generalizations. So, what is it that makes this category useful today? In this essay, I draw on a multilingual and multidisciplinary body of scholarly literature to argue that the study of religion is one of our best tools for understanding the echoes, parallels, and divergences that have defined the history of modern Latin America. Additionally, I hope to show that a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the study of religion has much to offer the fields of inquiry we call area studies.
This article explores how post–Cold War Andean narratives revive ideological and mythological beliefs in response to displacement, highlighting the liminal, transnational nature of Andean migratory literature and the fluidity of the concept of “andinidad.”
This article explores the role of food in a critical pedagogy that highlights the intersectionality of migration, class, and race in Peru from 1530 to the present. In a history course focused on Andean foodways, the readings examine Peru’s connection to global histories, including the invasion of the Americas, the slave trade, the abolition of the slave trade, and modern gastronomical revolutions. The course design encourages experiential learning via food labs. By preparing Andean dishes, students examine the labor, technology, flavor profiles, time, and ingredients involved. The recipes are recreated for analysis, comparison, discussion, and erudition, but include recipes and ingredients new to most North American students. Participants are encouraged to examine cookbooks as primary sources. These records enable students to break down recipes and instructions, uncovering cultural clues and histories. The class can be deployed in-person or asynchronous online formats, demonstrating that innovative online pedagogy can connect students with the past and develop cultural competency through a focused area studies course.
This article discusses the efforts of the Newberry Library to preserve and provide access to the manuscript of Mayan cosmology known as the Popul Vuh.
This article presents an analysis of Brazilian singer Anitta’s 2022 song and music video ‘Girl from Rio’ in light of its dialogue with one of bossa nova’s most famous songs ‘Garota de Ipanema’ (1962). I contend that, by reclaiming an aesthetics of excess that bossa nova aimed to eliminate from samba in the name of ‘sophistication,’ Anitta’s song and music video in question bring to the fore racial, gender, and class issues that are at the core of Brazilian society.
The study examines the factors that support long-term psychosocial resilience among reintegrated female survivors of human trafficking in Harare, Zimbabwe. A qualitative research approach was employed. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, key informant interviews, and observations with 20 participants who were selected based on the information power model and purposive sampling of key informants. The research was guided by Resilience Theory, and data analysis was conducted using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that victims rely on internal defence mechanisms such as developing "thick skin," which, both theoretically and practically, helps withstand external pressures, along with leveraging the support of "peer allies," temporarily distorting reality when necessary, and utilizing inner resilience. Overall, the case study also revealed diverse experiences of human trafficking, which necessitated the use of specialized techniques to foster long-term resilience.
The aim of this paper is to bring together the concepts of process geographies (Appadurai, 1997) and topochrones (Houben, 2022)—innovative approaches that have emerged from the rich debates within New Area Studies. We argue that it is precisely these approaches in Area Studies that are needed to overcome the threat of a return to a polarised worldview in the context of today’s incipient Second Cold War (Schindler et al., 2023). The paper proceeds in three steps. First, we introduce the origins of the two conceptual terms process geographies and topochrones, which provide the analytical lens for our main argument. Second, we discuss the three waves of Area Studies (Sidaway, 2017) with a focus on the third wave, which took shape as New Area Studies under the conditions of post–Cold War liberalisation and globalisation. We argue that today the constitutive conditions for conducting Area Studies research have once again fundamentally shifted, passing a tipping point into what can aptly be described as a Second Cold War—one that threatens to push the discipline back into a pre-1990s configuration, risking its co-optation into the geopolitical logics of renewed global polarisation. We address Area Studies’ positioning vis-a-vis an assertive universalism on the one hand and a defensive universalism on the other hand. In a third step, we use the preceding reflections to empirically apply the concepts of topochrones and process geographies as analytical lenses and propose that these concepts offer a valuable foundation for a Fourth Wave of Area Studies rooted in emancipatory potential.
War and peace have been extensively researched in Colombia over the past decades. However, little is said about the role that research can play as a driver of change in the transition from war to peace when research is carried out with those who have been part of the dynamics of the conflict or have found themselves in the middle of the crossfire. In this article, we discuss the experience of the "School, Territory and Post-Conflict: Grounding a Local Peace Culture in South Tolima, Colombia" project working with eight community organisations between 2018 and 2022 studying their experiences building peace during the armed conflict between the Revolution Armed Force of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government, and after the 2016 peace agreement. We discuss the transdisciplinary journey of the project and of transformations we have witnessed as a result with the hope that the lessons learned can inform ongoing discussions about how to widen further the research and methodological frontiers of New Areas Studies and beyond.
The article explores the everyday practice of public service delivery by comparing social care of people with learning disabilities in China and England and what we can learn from insights from the New Area Studies. We address three research questions: How is trust-building influenced by the beliefs and practices of local actors? How are the dilemmas posed by trust building managed by both state and local actors? What is the role of diplomacy in trust building? In section 2, we provide a rationale for our unusual comparison of China and England. In section 3, we summarise our theoretical approach of decentred governance and describe our ethnographic research method. In section 4, we describe the policy contexts of learning disabilities in Southampton and S District, Hangzhou. In section 5, we report our fieldwork on caring for those with learning disabilities. In section 6, we discuss the difference and similarities between the two policy arenas, especially using diplomacy to manage network relations. In section 7, we identify six lessons from the research and we draw the key lessons for practitioners in both countries. We offer the concluding plausible conjecture that local networks in both countries are a mix of hierarchy, markets and networks, and local actors in both networks must find diplomatic ways of managing their encounters with the state.
Nowadays, the discipline of International Relations (IR) is undergoing a profound transformation, aiming at becoming more plural, more diverse, more inclusive, and truly ‘global’. Henceforth emerges the need to adjust our theoretical frameworks to adequately incorporate the increasing plurality of visions and the diversity of authorships that currently populate the IR academic panorama. In this article, I make the case for a deeper, more meaningful, and more horizontal academic partnership between International Relations and Area Studies (AS). I believe it is the most appropriate way to decentre and pluralise the discipline of IR, via the attainment of profound, context-specific and locally situated knowledge of regional orders. As a preliminary step to further the engagement between these two disciplines, I address some aspects where AS and IR can establish a mutually enriching relationship. I do so by focussing on the English School of International Relations, while extending this call to entwine AS with other IR theoretical traditions.
This article uses the study of international human rights to examine the potential of New Area Studies (NAS) to enhance the efforts of scholars in Global International Relations (GIR) in their quest to re-vision international relations theory. GIR, which was founded as an explicit commitment to de-centering Western-dominated IR theory, embraces interdisciplinary knowledge from and about different areas of the world as a key part of its effort to understand the complexities of – and relations among – multiple localities, states and regions. Yet, while successful as a critique of dominant theory, GIR has not fared as well in cumulating insights across different localities, states and regions. Nor has it managed to go much beyond engaging with its original home discipline, political science. Both of these limitations are evident in recent scholarship on international human rights. This article shows how NAS can help GIR scholars move past these limitations while also illuminating hidden aspects of the discourse and practice of human rights across various regional settings. This is evident in three defining features of NAS: its commitment to area-specific expertise (broadly defined and reconceptualized beyond traditional categories); its emphasis on eliminating disciplinary silos to encourage conversations that span geographic space and area expertise; and its insistence on full inclusion of non-elite communities of scholars in the production of knowledge.
This paper is an exercise in auto-ethnography, discussing in the first person the impact of the American general George Armstrong Custer (1839-76) upon the imagination of a boy growing up in sixties Yorkshire. It is based on the premise that no person can ever be understood in isolation from the influence that they have had on others. Three encounters with the Custer myth are described: the board game The Battle of the Little Big Horn; Robert Siodmak’s film Custer of the West; and the comic strip ‘Custer’ in the British boys’ comic Jag. Charles Taylor’s notion of the imaginary is then used to theorise these cultural phenomena as stories that enable the practices of a society to make sense. Each phenomenon puts forward praiseworthy aspects of Custer – his courage, his charisma – but suppresses facts that would tarnish the image, such as his abusive treatment of female prisoners. The notion of the myth is discussed and it is shown how much of that myth still remains mysterious because it is intractable to empirical enquiry. The task today is to look at the ends to which the myth has been put. The paper concludes that growing up with Custer established a heroic construct that must now be rejected, even if its fascination remains. It is all too easy to be charmed by what should make us horrified.
Stories have power. They can reveal the ways in which lives and bodies are entangled with the material and social world. They can help convey the lived reality of situations in ways that traditional academic writing cannot. Attending to stories can aid efforts to turn towards a more embedded approach to knowledge generation. Stories hold particular promise for New Area Studies, both as a source to be read for greater and deeper understanding of the globe’s many different worlds at a time of dramatic change, and as a source of new methodologies and theoretical practices to revitalise the field. This article draws on literary geographical theories of space and fiction to offer a new way of appreciating stories. Not as communicators of thought and feeling, but as lively, active and ever-renewing co-actants in the creation and co-creation of space itself. In this framework, reading is not an act of knowledge accumulation, but rather an experiment in which the ontological categories of fact and fiction blur into each other. Texts are not static reflections of a place but can be geographers themselves, actively co-creating spaces in the world. I demonstrate this through a literary-geographical approach to fiction called ‘reading for space’, using two classics of American literature: Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. Although formally and tonally distinct, both novels create space in similar ways. This reading for space treats two novels not as snapshots of specific places as they once were, but as lively and active co-creators of new spaces.
This article presents a critical reflection on the meaning of crisis recovery, as experienced from the grassroots. It draws insights from a programme of research with indigenous and campesino communities in Colombia and Peru, undertaken in the period following the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a flexible, qualitative approach, the teams engaged in broad-ranging discussions about people’s concerns and aspirations. These exchanges revealed how people’s pandemic stories were inherently interconnected with other, ongoing and everyday risks associated with conflict, marginalization, poverty, displacement and environmental degradation. They also underlined how misconceived it can be to view the pandemic experience as some form of break from ‘normality’, externalizing the notion of crisis in a way that fails to acknowledge the historic and structural roots of risk and vulnerability. On the other hand, we also saw how capacities for coping with the crisis were already embedded in communities, partly as a consequence of long-faced injustices, reflected for example in the resurgence of communal care and indigenous practices. These perspectives conveyed a conception of recovery not as a linear or individualized trajectory, but as a multifaceted collective process that seeks to confront the dynamics of ongoing risks and injustices.
This is a reflective essay on materiality and imagination of Indigenous land ethics as expressed in global Indigenous writing. I explore Adivasi land ethics, particularly from the contexts of Odisha and Jharkhand, placing them alongside North American First Nations writings. The paper traces a range of resonances to inform queries on land ethics; in this, it begins from particular sites to global spaces to articulate broader questions for Environmental Studies. This is in the hope that the questions might enlighten and reify contemporary concerns in these respective geographical and intellectual locations, complicating the site and probing the intellectual divide between the Global North and the Global South in area studies, to see how Indigenous concerns globally are aligned in the face of a global climate crisis, as they are disproportionately affected due to historical injustices of empire, settler colonial enterprise, caste orders and religious nationalisms. While I draw from American Environmental Studies to situate the materiality of Indigenous philosophies, the essay affirms the enabling mindfulness of metaphors and how they can inform and strengthen material claims in the negotiation for Indigenous political rights in India, and elsewhere, by resisting co-options of Indigeneity that accompany pitfalls of literality. In this, the essay attempts to connect the generative iterations and expressions of ‘imagination’ as written by Indigenous writers who envision collective futures through Indigenous ‘humanisms’ that account the impact of colonial histories of dispossession, and affirm ethical responsibility towards the human and non-human world.
