Veronica Schild
Statement
LASA has been my intellectual and scholarly home since I first presented a paper as a newly minted PhD at the XVI International Congress in Washington, D.C. in 1991. Over the course of my career, I have lived through the remarkable transformation of what was once a predominantly U.S.-based multi-disciplinary coming together of scholars of Latin America to a genuinely international community where new generations of scholars from Latin America have a very strong presence, and where Latin Americanists from Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and Africa are increasingly active.
While the disciplines no doubt still have a strong presence in our Association, over the past decades the juxtaposition of voices from the humanities and social sciences has been invaluable. One significant shift has been the rise to prominence of the humanities in the study of Latin America, one which has brought about a cross-fertilization of epistemological and methodological approaches to tackle old and new questions. I strongly believe that this transformation of interests, topics, and approaches, without a doubt disconcerting to some, is not only inevitable but also signals the capacity of our Association to renew itself and maintain its relevance as a space for thinking collaboratively about the region.
In my own time as a LASA member, I have lived through this ongoing transformation as part of what was called “women’s studies” in the early 1990s. We now take for granted that “gender studies” is a legitimate and rich area of study, one capable of offering important insights into political, social, economic, and cultural phenomena. But this was a hard-won recognition. I was lucky to know that first generation of formidable feminists, many of whom are no longer with us, who plowed the field for us and who succeeded in convincing LASA that this was a scholarly initiative worth recognizing and supporting. I was a minor figure in their efforts to steer that early group, the Women’s Task Force, into the duly recognized and funded, interdisciplinary Gender and Feminist Studies Section of today. Initially, I was an Ad Hoc Member of the Executive Council of the Women’s Task Force, and I then went on to serve in various capacities as a Member of the Section, including as its Co-Chair in 2012-2013. I have also contributed to the selection of papers and panels on gender and sexuality topics, first as Track Chair and then as Co-Track Chair of Gender Studies for two LASA Congresses. These experiences have allowed me to learn from, and to value, the subsequent opening-up of Gender Studies into the diverse and multi-vocal areas the Section represents today. They have also convinced me that our Association has the capacity to continue to encourage our scholarship and exchanges, supporting, protecting, and funding both existing and unfolding spaces of encuentro and dialogue.
Today, Latin America is facing unprecedented political, socio-economic, ecological and cultural challenges for which many of our theories and categories, devised to explain conditions honed in other realities and historical moments, may no longer be adequate or sufficient. Questions arise about the exhaustion of the promise of market-based modernity, the crisis of neoliberal democracy, the steep environmental costs of dominant models of growth, and the mobilization of civil societies to abuse, inequality, and exclusion. Equally urgently, questions arise about who we must think and dialogue with as part of our efforts to elaborate the right tools to understand new and emergent conditions. The answers will require, I am convinced, renewed attention to the specific experiences of interlocutors from a wide spectrum of civil society organizations and movements. Should I be elected to the Executive Council of LASA, my responsibility would be to ensure continuing support for our Association’s commitment to opening up spaces for encuentro and dialogue. In particular, I would like to promote ongoing efforts to reach beyond our conventional scholarly spaces of knowledge production in order to facilitate collaborations between knowledge producers situated in the academy and in civil society. Now, more than ever, we need to promote and support these dialogues and exchanges as fundamental components for enriching our ways of making our scholarship relevant to the needs of the present.