Leonardo Avritzer

Statement

I attended my first LASA conference in Los Angeles in 1992, where I presented my first academic paper. After I and a few colleagues graduated from the New School for Social Research during the early ’90s, LASA allowed our group to meet on a regular basis and to re-organize its academic agenda. LASA has also been the venue for the organization of new research projects over the years, as democratization in Latin America evolved and new research themes emerged. Like me and my peers, LASA has engaged and connected several generations of Latin American and North American scholars. I believe it should continue to do so.

Since its foundation, LASA has had to deal with dynamic and often challenging political processes in Latin America. Over the last decades, we have witnessed growth in regionally based research in many countries in Latin America along with more inclusive research agendas and an increasing diversity of researchers who now come from more diverse cultural and economic backgrounds. This important trend still has a long way to go in order to include young scholars from less connected areas of their countries and from countries with fewer resources. I would support the extension and strengthening of the association’s role in supporting young and diverse scholars from Latin America.

Current political and economic trends pose challenges to our countries that will affect the dynamics of our professional association in the near future. We are once again facing social and political turmoil in the region. Recent events in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela, among others, have shown we may be entering into new critical times. Though Latin America has faced such moments in the past, the new challenges are different because they affect the academic and professional lives of scholars and their academic institutions. Today, in Brazil, Nicaragua and Venezuela, universities and scholars are under attack. It is not unreasonable to expect that this trend will soon be extend to other countries. Economic crisis and the reversion of trends toward stability and sustainable development also have impacts on higher education, tending to result in widespread budget cuts. Perhaps more intriguing is combination of the political persecution of scholars with the questioning of scientific knowledge itself, especially the humanities.

The Executive Council and LASA’s membership will need to deal extensively with these issues in the coming years. The LASA community must lay out an agenda for supporting Latin American research in this new scenario. This agenda needs to include active monitoring of new governments and their education policies. It must also support research on and analysis of political change in the region. The association needs to invest in existing networks for the protection of scholars and endangered research areas and help build emerging ones.

While the last few decades have seen a expansion of nationally-based research on Latin America and the inclusion of a much more diverse group of scholars and themes, contemporary attacks on science and on the humanities threaten most those who have most recently gained access to international academic associations such as LASA. The association must, therefore, pay particular attention to how new educational policies in Latin America will affect the diversity of graduate research in the region and of the researchers who engage in it.