The Global Latinidades Center & Center for Convivial Research & Autonomy Receive $36,200 UC Alianza México Grant to Support Community-Based Research Methodology Training in Oaxaca City!

The Global Latinidades Center, in collaboration with the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA) in San José, California, and Center for Intercultural Dialogues and Encounters (CEDI) in Oaxaca City, Mexico, was awarded an Alianza México grant for $36,200 to expand their 2022 pilot initiative into the 2023 Convivial Praxis Workshop for Community-Based Researchers Summer Ateneo 2023: A Binational Multi-Organizational Partnership. With matching funds from the Global Latinidades Center’s Multicampus Research Projects Initiative, this project involves year-long activities focused on conviviality theory and praxis predicated upon egalitarian solidarity methodologies that resist extractivist and hierarchical research paradigms. Divided into three phases—1) international agenda setting diálogos with participants in 7 countries; 2) in-person Summer Ateneo in Oaxaca City; and 3) implementation activities—which brings together researchers, public intellectuals, and grassroots activists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, (UCSB); University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, (KHM); New York University (NYU); Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, Mexico and local collectives and community-based projects across the U.S and Mexico, as well as virtual participants across multiple geographies and time zones.

Engaging critical issues associated with what the Zapatistas theorize as the 4th World War, this initiative focuses on autonomy and grassroots initiatives including those reclaiming “commons” typical of “societies in movement” across México. Organized around a unique pedagogical and community-based research approach, the Summer Ateneo 2023 introduces convivial research, an innovative research and knowledge approach, and community regenerative activities in defense of life, which currently confront militarized and gendered violence, underclass criminalization, extractivist development, and environmental degradation. A collectivist community-based research approach, convivial research and insurgent learning refuses to objectify communities of struggle while also listening and sensing for the many convivial tools, or those collectively agreed upon interdependent devices fundamental to community regeneration, including those that draw on a range of vernacular knowledges and subsistence practices that locally-rooted struggles make available. 

The expanded 2023 partnership builds on the 2022 pilot project, which included four monthly virtual conversatorios that led up to a ten-day in-person program in Oaxaca (August 1-11, 2022). The Summer Ateneo 2023 again brings together research and community action projects from throughout California, the US, Oaxaca, and globally to engage critical areas of reflection and action that include: care for life and defense of territory; oppositions to extractivism; insurgency in, against, and beyond the transnational prison industrial complex; transterritoriality; counterhegemonic creative cultural productions, insurgent street systems of information, and knowledge ecologies; resistances, rebellions, and refusals of women and families against intersectional violences of late racial gendered capitalism; and a range of intersecting struggles. The Summer Ateneo series makes possible open accessible consistent and horizontal spaces that weave together communities of struggle across California, Oaxaca, and beyond. This summer's convergence will once again extend networked autonomous learning spaces to support grassroots and scholarly researchers to advance grassroots, horizontal convivial research efforts. Networked spaces include conversatorios (open dialogue sessions), talleres (collaborative workshops), tertulias (thematic dialogues), and various excursions to sites of struggle that demonstratively support the development and enhancement of alternative grassroots convivial research projects. 

Partners in the Summer Ateneo 2023 include researchers and community activators across the U.S., Europe, and Mexico coordinating between collaborators in Oaxaca: Mauricio del Villar and Juan Mayorga of CEDI; Clint Terrell (UCSB & GLC) and Michael A. Parra (UCSB & GLC); Carlos Cruz (UCSC & GLC) and Dr. Annie Paradise (CCRA San José), Dr. Manuel Callahan (CCRA San José), and Dr. Ben Olguin (PI & UCSB GLC).

For more information, please contact Dr. Manuel Callahan at motinero@gmail.com or
GlobalLatinidadesUCSB@gmail.com