The 2024 Global Spains Workshop on Conviviality and Accompaniment Praxis was a ten-day interdisciplinary initiative that introduced students to the ethics and methods of action-research in collaboration with grassroots organizations. The Global Latinidades Center devoted $175,000 to develop a program for non-extractive, collectivist modes of knowledge production and various models of organic intellectual praxis. This international workshop was developed in partnership with Duke University’s Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South and Madrid’s grassroots organization YoSoyElOtro. It focused on global transatlantic approaches to various ethnic and area studies–Latina/o/e/x, Latin American, Global, and allied and intersecting fields.
This partnership brought together ten US students, eight students based in Madrid, and eighteen Spanish grassroots cultural arts and social movement organizers in Madrid at a transformative moment in southern European and hemispheric contexts.
The group met at La Parcería, a migrant grassroots organization near the Lavapiés neighborhood to examine questions that link the legacies of Francoism to the contemporary moment. Through morning provocatorios and critical walking tours, they explored the following questions:
How does “Global Spains” as a conceptual site expand our understanding of Global South interstitial geographies? And how do submerged and emerging practice-based initiatives reframe, reimagine or interrupt the normative narratives and archives in Spain? What kind of praxis might emerge through the configuration of collaborative spaces across research and activism? What kinds of knowledge and action can we generate across the multiple interstices (global/local, academic/grassroots) in Global Spains?
Participants explored these ongoing questions through a series of practical sessions and hands-on activities that included creative workshops, critical tours, and site visits. Among the collaborators are Traficantes de Sueños, Servicio Activo Doméstico, Todxlapraxis, Universidad Feminista, Sindicato de Manteros, EspacioAfro, SOS Carabanchel, and Ateneo la Maliciosa. Download full schedule here.
The initiative involved informational sessions, site visits with local organizations, and dialogic activities that revolved around the long legacy of community organizing in Spain during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Workshop thematic clusters included exile and migration, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ecocide, and critical environmentalisms, all with attention to class-based inflections. Global Spains connects contemporary processes to historical legacies from WWII, the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), and post-dictatorship formations, as well as sociopolitical and cultural movements. Nearly four decades of Franco’s repression was complemented by historical occlusions. Spain’s constitutional monarchy is based on a white-washing of history that centers around a model democracy, one with a supposed resolution that many other Latin American and Southern European nations were encouraged to emulate. Going beyond Spanish exceptionalism and its democratic pacts of forgetting, Global Spains emphasizes the transnational dimensions of contestatory historiographies from below created through collaborative challenges to power. Spain, a central and transient hub of Global South migrations, including African, Latin American, and Asian diasporas, is undergoing fluid transformations and configurations that disorient normative understandings of national attachments. Global Spains offers a unique opportunity to work and expand on temporal, linguistic, visual, architectural, embodied, living archives.