Since the peace agreements, Colombia has become the focus of research related to conflict and postconflictsituations and also receives a growing attention in public perceptions. The country has been frequently associated with endemic violence in the popular imaginary, in public media and academic research. Here, space has long been interpreted as contested in a physical sense that means as a territory over which is fought or where violence occurs. However, this perspective on space is limited to seeing it as a resource to be owned and exploited.
In contrast, the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and humanities provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between social space (cities/ landscapes etc), conflict (dynamics, actors, urban resistance etc) and popular imaginations (memory/ narratives etc.) in much greater depth.
The workshop is thought as a platform for recent research projects about Columbia based in Switzerland. We propose to address these three overarching concepts of conflict, space and memory as a main window to allow for a broad scope of presentations that might be interlinked and speak to each other.
For this workshop, we intend to create connections and exchange within the Colombia-related academic world within Switzerland and abroad while bringing diverse disciplinary backgrounds, regional interests and historical and contemporary perspectives together.