Patricia Funes - “Independencia y Nación en la historia intelectual argentina y latinoamericana”

Coordinated by María Pía López, the panel “Independence and Nation in Argentine and Latin American Intellectual History” featured Elías Palti, Patricia Funes, Fernanda Beigel, Eduardo Grüner, and Ricardo Forster. Patricia Funes holds a PhD in History. She is a researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council) and a Professor of Latin American Social History at the University of Buenos Aires. She also teaches postgraduate courses at several universities in Argentina and abroad. Her research and publications focus on the field of political and cultural ideas in Latin America during the 20th century. The event took place on July 7, 2016, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, as part of the closing of the University Forum for the Bicentennial. University Forum for the Bicentennial. 1816-2016. Conquests. Controversies. Challenges. The Latin American nations emerged from the break with the colonial order. From wars with former occupiers and conflicts with inhabitants of different ethnicities and cultures. From commercial enclaves and political wills. None of these periods ceased to debate what it meant to build a sovereign nation. But the idea of ​​sovereignty itself did change. Two hundred years after the declaration of Argentine independence, it is necessary to revisit the old questions and the current dilemmas. Discussing a nation, its autonomy, and its possibilities requires starting from its real heterogeneity, from considering the plurality that constitutes its existence, and from the controversial nature of any of its definitions. Thinking about the future invites us to understand the past, but also to pay persistent attention to the present. A nation is a collection of memories, languages, territories, productive networks, bonds between people, conflicts, and rights. Two hundred years after the declaration of Argentine independence, universities invite us to discuss and converse, to think together and debate these processes. Universities navigating one of their most challenging periods, institutions where the forces and will for profound reconstruction reside, are not hesitating to step outside their academic routines to establish a space for reflection, creation, and debate. This forum will examine how this nation was forged, the conflicts that shaped it, the imaginations, struggles, and desires from which it emerged, the debates and passions that call it together, the freedoms it promises, the rights it owes, and the horizons it projects. The current situation demands that universities speak out, engage in public reflection, uphold their commitment to the democratic ideal, and continue building, across generations, the defense of heterogeneity and pluralism. Following these principles, thematic panels and activities with social and academic leaders from various universities across the country will be held between June 20th and July 9th. Topics to be addressed include the external debt and Argentina's productive sectors. debates on language and emancipation; the public university; identities and cultural diversity; the conquest of human, civil and sexual rights; the social debt; Science and Technology and the development model; conceptual debates on Independence, autonomy and sovereignty; Argentina in the world; sovereignty and the Falklands in the 21st Century; cultural production and the media; the democratization of speech; democracy and its challenges; the participation of women from the 19th to the 21st century; workers in Argentine political life, among others.