Mapping Affect to Understand and Impede the Reproduction of Violence in Latin America

CLAS Seed Grant     Interpersonal violence is ubiquitous throughout Latin America, and some of the highest levels of violence in the world are found within the region. This violence transcends racial and class barriers, resists advances in legal and human rights protections, and appears not to have reduced (and may even have increased) with the expansion of democracy over the last several decades. As such, understanding and preventing violence and its reproduction has become one of the core questions for Latin America.

This project links faculty from humanities, law, design, and the social sciences, who will work collaboratively with partners to conduct focused research that engages interpersonal violence in the region in a transdisciplinary manner. The study uses the theoretical concept of “affect” as a unifying concept to link faculty from diverse academic backgrounds. Affect highlights the direct, embodied, experiential nature of social reality and has gained significance in recent years as a critical response to the dominance of abstract theorizing in multiple fields. Violence is, by its very nature, definition, and meaning, a physically grounded experience; it is an unmediated realm of pain, feeling, hurt and harm. Yet considerable work in this area has either focused on direct, factual documentation, as seen in numerous human rights and policy reports, or on highly theoretical reviews. This project uses the idea of affect as a unifying concept to make sense of violence in the region as a complex social, cultural, and structural element of the region which can only be understood––and thereby addressed and ideally prevented––through an engagement with its meaning, specificity and fundamentally experiential nature.

This project was sponsered by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Institute for Humanities Research.