CALAS: Laboratorio II has started!

Published by kg-redaktion on

 

The second CALAS Laboratory, “Confronting inequalities in Latin America: perspectives on wealth and power,” began in January with the aim of reflecting on one of the most relevant issues in Latin America: the structures of social inequality around the accumulation of wealth in one of the most unequal regions of the world.

Laboratory II seeks to approach this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective that is new and usually little addressed by the social sciences and humanities: the study of wealth. The scientific leadership team and researchers associated with the CALAS lab start from the premise that inequality is a relational category and that therefore poverty remains incomprehensible as long as one does not look at the other side of the coin: Wealth. This requires an analysis of the structural framework of institutions and actors that defines how and through which mechanisms wealth is generated and accumulated, how wealth is distributed, and how power is organized.

Thus, Labor II seeks to place wealth, power and elites, dispossession and conflict, and the constellation of historical social inequalities in relation to political and state logics. It puts the economic category of rent at the center of academic and policy debate in the region. The aim is also to generate theoretical-conceptual-methodological knowledge to support positions and proposals for more egalitarian societies.

Lab II is being developed under the scientific leadership of Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Angela Schrott from the University of Kassel, and Valeria Coronel from FLACSO-Ecuador.  The team also includes scientific coordinators Jan Ickler, Irene Lungo and Rebeca Ramos.

Categories: CALAS