I am glad to organize this interdisciplinary panel with Clara Ruvituso, Ramiro Segura and Astrid Ulloa from Mecila! Consider submitting your work:

Interdisciplinary Panel
07.09 Latin America under the Conviviality-Inequality lens: Current scenarios and possible futures of living together at the

Congreso Internacional del Consejo Europeo de Investigaciones Sociales de América Latina (CEISAL)
13-15 June 2022 in Helskinki, Finland

ABSTRACT
This panel invites contributions that discuss the current scenarios and possible futures in Latin America under the lens of Conviviality-Inequality. In the last years, Conviviality-Inequality studies developed a focus on Latin America, initiating productive dialogue with Latin American social thought, otherwise often displaced to the margins of global knowledge circulation, where it dwells together with postcolonial studies, the critiques of anthropocentrism, and further critical theories of the other "souths" and "norths". The panel aims to go beyond established conceptions of coloniality and modernity, globality and locality, or parallel notions that present all too simple binaries, juxtapositions, and closures.
Multiple and intersecting social, political, and material regimes have shaped Latin American territorialities. They have emerged from the confluence and entanglement of colonial and imperialist, as well as modern and developmentalist globalizing forces and their contestations. These regimes shape time-spaces of different scales, from the global to the local, from the event to long durée. The paired concept Conviviality-Inequality captures the co-existence of ever-changing configurations of these multiple processes and their spatializations. While conviviality theoretically encompasses the spectrum from conflict to peace, its conceptual marriage to inequality hones in on the hierarchical, unequal historical condition, in Latin America and beyond. Current debates of zumbification, aquilombar, buen vivir, and ways of rethinking creolization, mestizaje, négritude, imperialism, and ancestral knowledge explore the convivial configurations of the Latin American pasts, presents, and futures. They take the interdependent inequalities and differences into account (among others, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, citizenship, human/more-than-human) as
well as the countless forms of resistance and contestation that have arisen in the region. Attention to such configurations brings onto-epistemological openings to the forefront: spatialities, temporalities, colonialities, and modernities are all constituted in the plural.
Within the rapidly changing global scenario of both global social movements, such as “Vidas negras importam”, “Estallido social”, “Fridays for Future”, and the Covid-19 pandemic, Conviviality-Inequality opens a novel and productive opportunity for analysis given its focus on specific tensions at local and global levels, between inequality and differences, and their contestations. Papers should empirically explore concrete examples of Conviviality-Inequality, making use of the full spectrum of onto-epistemological, material, and symbolic plurality. Beyond the debates addressed so far, some such examples: the re-emergence of State power from urban centers to national borders, from the intimate community to the geopolitical scale; the salience of less-regarded categories of difference, such as age, dis/ability, or legal status in interaction that unfold in the configuration of race, class, and gender; the reconfiguring and diverse contestations in relation to the body, nature, or the non-human; the tensions, inequalities, and opportunities of the digital transformation and social media in knowledge circulation. Based on empirical reflections of the current conjuncture, we would like to discuss what kinds of convivial scenarios and futures become possible and conceivable in Latin America when the pluralities, synergies, tensions, interconnections, and contradictions are fully explored to address both continuities and change.

Practical Information

• Submissions via: https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/ceisal-2022/call-for-papers-open-from-sept-15-to-nov-30-2021
• Deadline 30 November 2021
• Abstract Length 300 words

in Migration Studies [Open Access]
with Fran Meissner

Abstract
In light of current experiences with migration-driven diversification, is it still conducive to think about the effects of international migration by advocating for immigrant integration? This article argues that there are key problems with European uses of immigrant integration logics that cannot be resolved through redefinitions or reappropriations of the term. Even highly refined notions of immigrant integration misconstrue the role and relevance of differences in diversity dynamics. Immigrant integration further risks concealing and perpetuating power dynamics and (colonial) hierarchies. These continue to shape the social relevance of differences. Analytically thinking about superdiversity directs us to paying more attention to disintegration, a notion that cannot be reduced and measured by way of individual or group performance. To be able to usefully engage with disintegration, we argue that it needs to be divorced from ideas about social fragmentation and social collapse. To do this, we draw on recent developments in the literature on conviviality to emphasise the relational practices, power asymmetries, and materialities that enter into negotiations of difference. Convivial disintegration aptly addresses continuously reconfiguring and uncertain social environments. Our article thus provides a deromanticised and enabling provocation for easing integration anxieties.

in African Diaspora 11 (1-2): 53-70

Abstract
​Based on my time with im/mobile West Africans in Senegal and Spain since 2007, I propose conviviality to conceptualise the complexity of my interlocutors’ local and diasporic tactics and views of living with difference. Simple everyday encounters such as greeting and dwelling in urban spaces serve to disentangle their various levels of reflection, habitual expectations and tactical action. They had local to global reference frameworks at their disposal. Not pretending to represent their knowledge, I discuss the inspirations I received from trying to understand what they shared with me non/verbally regarding living with difference. To start from this decentred set of premises challenges established Western/Northern politics of living with difference. Through conviviality, I show a distinct way of engaging multiple and overlapping ways of differentiating and homogenising practices and raise awareness for the importance and feasibility of minimal socialities in diasporic configurations, transnational migrations and the respective local urban contexts.

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