The Latin American Hub is an interdisciplinary node for knowledge production, dissemination and exchange, originally set up by doctoral students based in Goldsmiths. Its aim is to develop and sustain research networks, communication, and collaboration between researchers based in the UK and in Latin America.
With its emphasis on the relational dimension of research, the Hub gathers together multiple interests and viewpoints that share a connection with Latin America, and yet do not necessarily fit within an ‘area studies’ approach. It provides a platform for diverse modes of knowledge production on a comparative, trans-regional axis which takes Latin America and the UK as initial poles but is not exhausted by them. The Hub aims to both stimulate these engagements and to promote intellectual dialogues through research and scholarly exchanges, conferences, exhibitions, websites, and other media. From these activities, trans-regional cross-pollination can be fostered beyond traditional means such as academic writings. Trans-regional and interdisciplinary dialogues are thus at the centre of the Hub’s concerns.
This dialogical strategy acknowledges the geopolitics of knowledge and research production as a structuring fact of contemporary global academia. Since the Hub is initially formed mainly by Latin American postgraduate students and scholars who are currently based in the UK, the question of how to think about/from/on/beyond Latin America acquires a specific urgency. Hence dialogue is understood as flux and migration of ideas, objects and subjects, which in turn entangle affective, economic, geopolitical, aesthetic and epistemological processes.