2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding a joint project of Freie Universität Berlin and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to research social, economic and political inequalities in Latin America. The aim of the researchers from the University's Latin America Institute (LAI) and the Foundation's Ibero-American Institute (IAI) is to develop new perspectives on inequalities in Latin America. The funding amounts to 3.7 million euros over four years.

The "Interdependent Inequality Research in Latin America" project is one of four nationwide competence networks that the Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding with the aim of strengthening and further developing area studies. The aim is to consolidate an international research network that investigates how the distribution of resources and goods as well as participation in social interactions and positions of power in Latin America are characterised by transregional networks of interdependence.

What does the Brazilian steak on European plates have to do with soya cultivation in the Amazon and what social inequalities result from these interdependencies? What new opportunities for social mobility for educationally disadvantaged classes in Mexico City are created by the low-cost production facilities in the People's Republic of China? What insights and explanations can Latin American and European inequality research offer in this regard? These are some of the questions that researchers will be investigating as part of the competence network.

Inequality is more than just a question of justice, poverty or dependency. Figures of inequality are a multi-layered, multi-dimensional phenomenon that spans and networks regions of the world. In the competence network, the participating researchers therefore want to search for new, but also existing concepts and phenomena of inequality.

The project is headed by sociologist Prof Sérgio Costa, political scientist Prof Marianne Braig from the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University of Berlin and ethnologist Dr Barbara Göbel, Director of the Ibero-American Institute of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

With this project, the researchers want to achieve synergy effects between social science research on inequality in Germany and Latin America as well as regional studies. A special feature is also the mediation between research and practice. In addition to the LAI and the IAI, the German Development Institute (DIE) and the Institute of Latin American Studies of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA-ILAS) are therefore part of the institutional core of the competence network in Germany. A further 50 institutions in Europe, Latin America and the USA are also involved.

Contacts:

• Sophie Esch, Coordinator of the Competence Network, telephone: 030 / 838-53069,
  e-mail: inequalities(at)lai.fu-berlin(dot)de
• Press Office of Freie Universität Berlin, telephone: 030 / 838-73180,
  e-mail: kommunikationsstelle(at)fu-berlin(dot)dehttp://www.fu-berlin.de
• Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Press and Public Relations, Dr Stefanie Heinlein, telephone: 030 / 266-41 1440, fax 030 / 266-41 2821, e-mail: s.heinlein(at)hv.spk-berlin(dot)de

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