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Dialogues Across World Regions: A Recap of the HCIAS Colloquium, Summer Semester 2025

In 2025, the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS) organizes its Colloquium Lecture Series around the title “Dialogues across World Regions”. The goal is to encourage exchanges between Ibero-America and other regions by bringing together researchers from various fields, disciplines, and nationalities. The first edition took place in the Summer Term 2025, in nine public lectures that took place between April 23rd and July 16th, 2025. The second edition is now taking place in the Winter Term 2025/2026.

By adopting this format, the HCIAS aims to embed presentations on Ibero-American studies into debates pertaining to area studies as a whole. By inviting Heidelberg University’s regional centers to contribute, the Colloquium sets a focus on how area studies can make important contributions to addressing global issues beyond their region-specific research agendas. The HCIAS Colloquium also counts with invited guest speakers who conduct research on Latin America, the USA, South Asia, and Europe with the result of a series of exciting talks and lively discussions.

In that sense, the Colloquium of the past summer semester 2025 which we recap in this blog post, featured a diverse lineup of speakers including HCIAS researchers as well as speakers from the South Asia Institute Heidelberg (SAI), the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) and various guest speakers from institutions in Germany and abroad such as the Latin American Institute (LAI) of Free University of Berlin, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), and the Department of History and Keough School of Global Affairs of the University of Notre Dame.

The nine sessions of the Colloquium included seven in-person lectures and two online “Sustainable Coffee Break” sessions organized in cooperation with the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE) and the Heidelberg Center for Latin America (HCLA) in Santiago de Chile through the Heidelberger Brücke Latin America Edition.

Migration corridors in the Americas, the importance of area studies for Europe in lieu of the diversity of liberal scripts in Latin America, the impacts of a just energy transition on both sides of the Atlantic, anthropological research methodologies in South Asia, the linguistic prowess in Spanish of returnees to Romania, and the role of insects and ecological phenomena  in historical processes in the Caribbean were among the topics addressed throughout the nine lectures.

The Colloquium opened on April 23 with Prof. Dr. Renata Motta (HCIAS) and Dr. Claudia Giacoman (UC) discussing “Food and Socioecological Change”. That lecture was co-organized between HCIAS, HCLA, and HCE as part of the Heidelberger Brücke Latin America edition and entailed a conversation in which both researchers explored the intersection of food systems and environmental sustainability. Prof. Dr. Motta presented a comparative analysis of food justice coalitions in Brazil and Germany while Dr. Giacoman shared her findings on veganism as a sociological phenomenon among the Chilean youths, which was followed by a series of questions from the audience.

Then, on April 30, Jun. Prof. Dr. Yaatsil Guevara (HCIAS and HCA) delivered the talk “From Areas to Corridors. Rethinking the Americas through the Lens of Forced Migration”. She addressed the migration cultures in Latin America and highlighted the importance of analyzing migration beyond the perspective of nation-states as units of analysis by, for instance, embracing the concept of migratory corridors as geopolitical connectors to better understand  south-north interdependencies across the Americas.

The first talk featuring a guest lecturer in this series was titled “The Mosquitoes of the Caribbean: An Ecological History of Global Politics”. It was delivered on May 7 by Prof. Dr. Bert Hoffmann (GIGA Institute Hamburg), who described the role that mosquitoes (as vectors of diseases like yellow fever and malaria) played on a series of historical events in the Caribbean such as the Haitian and Cuban independence wars and the construction of the Panama Canal. In doing so, Hoffmann addressed a largely overlooked dimension of armed conflicts in the Caribbean and vividly challenged the common and official historical narratives of the region.

On May 21, Prof. Dr. Rahul Mukherji (SAI) presented the lecture “India’s Democracy and Attacks on Civil Society”, which focused on the instruments that the current Indian regime uses to tame and silence civil society activism of various types. Prof. Dr. Mukherji highlighted that India’s competitive authoritarian regime under Modi has deployed various instruments to silence its diverse civil society, which shows how Indian ethno-nationalism targets religious minorities such as Muslims as well as marginalized members of Indian society such as the Dalit caste.

As a guest lecturer, Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Marianne Braig (LAI Free University Berlin) delivered a talk on “Why Area Studies Matter for Europe – Entanglements and the diversity of liberal scripts from the perspective of Latin America” on June 11. This lecture focused on the history of Western liberal scripts in Latin America and the invisibiliized contributions of countries in that region to the broader ideas contained in said scripts. Prof. Dr. Braig  used potatoes, sugar cane, and silver as examples of transregional interdependencies between Latin America and Europe. She also highlighted Latin American contributions to liberal scripts and international human rights such as the freedom from forced disappearance.

On June 25 followed the second session of the Sustainable Coffee Break organized by the Heidelberger Brücke Latin America Edition. It was titled “Just Transition – Challenges and Debates from Europe and Latin America” and included the participation of Jun. Prof. Dr. Rosa Lehmann (HCIAS) and Prof. Dr. Johannes Rehner (UC), who discussed the challenges that the transition to a low-carbon, environmentally sustainable economy where the well-being of workers and communities is prioritized poses for both regions. The discussion covered labor relations, environmental and climate justice, the complexities of community participation in implementing a just transition, and the tension that exists between environmental and economic impacts.

Next, on July 2, Prof. Dr. William Sax (SAI) delivered the talk “Area Studies and Methodology in the Anthropology of South Asia”. As part of it, he not only discussed and illustrated the concepts of contextualism, empiricism, and decoloniality, but also presented a critical view of methodological empiricism in social sciences while underlining the advantages that ethnographies can offer to create knowledge in such a diverse and unique region as South Asia.

On July 9, Dr. Héctor Álvarez (HCIAS) offered the lecture titled “Romanian Return Migration from Spain: Language, Transnational Ties, and Uprooting”. As part of this lecture, he presented some of his latest findings on the prevalence of Spanish among members of the Romanian diaspora in Spain who decided to return to Romania. In doing so, Dr. Álvarez highlighted that Spanish-speaking minors who returned to Romania faced a stagnation of language skills in Spanish due to language attrition and described the role of Spanish as a migratory language in the identity reconfiguration of returnees.

The last event of the HCIAS Wednesday Colloquium lecture series was titled “Communities of Knowledge: The United States and Latin America in a Global Context (1870 – 1930)” and took place on July 16. Delivered by Prof. Dr. Ted Beatty (University of Notre Dame), who during the summer semester was a visiting scholar at the HCA, the lecture focused on how engineering emerged as a state project during those six decades in both Latin America and the US. Dr. Beatty examined how newly professionalized and highly mobile engineers created new communities of knowledge that facilitated extra-regional connections but also created new forms of exclusion.

The Summer Semester 2025 edition of the HCIAS colloquium stood out for its intellectual diversity and inter-regional scope. Our initiative to engage in scientific dialogue across world regions was well received among the colleagues of the area studies centers at Heidelberg and by the speakers and attendants of the lectures. The “Dialogues across World Regions” lecture series at the HCIAS is thus being continued in the Winter Semester 2025/26. Information about the lecture program from October to January can be found here. We look forward to a new series of inspiring talks and dynamic conversations connecting Latin America, the USA, South Asia, East Asia, and Europe, and will sum up the Colloquium again here in the HCIAS Blog.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
HCIAS Blog (October 22, 2025). Dialogues Across World Regions: A Recap of the HCIAS Colloquium, Summer Semester 2025. HCIAS Blog. Retrieved February 8, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/150de


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