Tathagatan Ravindran

After decades of neoliberal hegemony, Colombia witnessed a series of political mobilizations against the same policies that culminated in a popular insurrection in 2021 and the election of the country´s first Leftist President. Ethnographic research on transitions in different parts of the world reveals that they are marked by an accumulation of hybrid practices rather than radical historical breaks. In that context, this research examines how far the anti-neoliberal mobilizations in Colombia and the electoral victory of the left are symptomatic of deeper transformations in political subjectivities and common sense. How far did the mobilizations manage to strengthen counter-narratives that question the justification and naturalization of socioeconomic inequalities? The project will be undertaken in collaboration with community organizations that played an important role in the popular insurrection. These organizations seek to build upon the oppositional consciousness that emerged during the popular insurrection and create a long-lasting counterhegemonic political project. In the spirit of politically engaged research, the objective of this project is to create a popular archive of the memories of struggle and organize workshops to collectively analyze the narratives recollected to put academic scholarship in dialogue with the knowledge that emerges in the trenches of struggle.