Moving Margins of the Human Sciences Geopolitics, Gender and Disciplines / A Two-Day Symposium

Moving Margins
Programme and Time Schedule

Moving Margins of the Human Sciences Geopolitics, Gender and Disciplines
A Two-Day Symposium

With a tour of the Exhibition Stitching Women’s Voices (by curator Valentina Gajardo & artist Francisca Aninat)

18th and 19th June 2026 / Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Rd, Cambridge, CB3 9DP, University of Cambridge

This event is organised by the Faculty of History and the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge with generous support from the Trevelyan Fund and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding Guarantee[G124706].

Aims

Asking what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts in the period from the late-nineteenth century until today, this two-day symposium seeks to:

I. Centre actors and fields of knowledge that have been on the moving margins of the histories of the human sciences (including the humanities and social sciences), in particular:

• Latin American actors (including indigenous peoples) in transnational networks
• Women from the Americas
• Educational, archaeological, anthropological and feminist/gender studies research in connection with often more powerful disciplines and multidisciplinary fields, including medicine, psychology, economics and international relations.

II. Highlight how some countries, actors and disciplines are not necessarily excluded but occupy different positions within shifting forms of subordinate inclusion, with variable degrees of recognition or erasure of their contributions.

III. Contribute towards global histories of the human sciences that:

• Bridge neighbouring but not always interactive fields of knowledge.
• Examine how boundaries are drawn to produce separate disciplines and different types of knowledge; and how boundary-making contributes, or not, to the production of epistemic and social hierarchies.
• Challenge binaries between knowers and known, knowers and doers, intellect and body, mind and materialities, male and female.

Programme

Thursday 18th June

9.15 to 9.30 - Welcome and introduction

9.30 to 11.00 - Panel 1
Boundary-Making: Medicine, Archaeology Anthropology and ‘Local’ Knowledge

Yasser Martínez Tapia
Cinvestav, Mexico City.
Transitions of Hygiene Knowledge between Professional and Educational Spaces: Mexico, 2nd half of the nineteenth century.

Sophie Brockmann
University College London
Making Maya Sites: Land Use, Environmental Knowledge, and Archaeological Authority in Guatemala.

Rosanna Dent
University of Cambridge.
Politicising Research(ers): A’uwẽ Interlocutors and their Anthropologists under Brazilian Dictatorship


11.00 to 11.30 - Coffee

11.30 to 13.00. - Panel 2
Anti-Imperialist Thought, Education and Anthropology

Carsten-Andreas Schulz and Tom Long
POLIS, University of Cambridge and University of Warwick
Colonial Anti-Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, UK
World Making and Educational Knowledge in the Definition of UNESCO’s Programme of Fundamental Education, 1946-1947

Alina Horta Méndez
Freie Universität Berlin
Post-war aspirations of social change: the role of anthropology in UNESCO’s Fundamental Education Programme (1946-1958)


13.00 to 14.00 - Break

14.00 to 15.30 - Panel 3
Knowledge Networks: Latin America in Transnational Context

Alvaro Morcillo Laiz
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid, Spain
Can Recipients Resist Donors Without Marshalling Knowledge?
UNESCO Networks and the Latin American School of Social Sciences (1956-1973)

Marcelo Caruso
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
Socialist margins: Educational cooperation, the German Democratic Republic and periphery (proto)socialisms in Latin America (Cuba & Nicaragua, 1960-1990).



Friday 19th June

10.00 to 11.00 - Keynote
Susanne Schmidt, University of Basel, Switzerland.
A Sweet Experiment: The Hidden History of the Marshmallow Test

11 to 11.30 hrs - Coffee

11.30 to 13.00  - Panel 4
Women’s and Feminist Knowledge Within and Beyond Institutions

Rebeca Gómez & Camila Orozco
Université Lumière Lyon & Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne.
What Feminist Economists Study: A Historical Analysis of Topics and Contributions Since the creation of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)

Rebecca Turkington
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.
Situating Gender Studies in Transition: the Global Ecosystem of Research on Women in the 1990s


13.00 to 14.00 - Break

14.00 to 15.00. - Comments and discussion.

15.00 to 16.00 - Stitching Women’s Voices
Presentation & Exhibition Tour by curator Valentina Gajardo and artist Francisca Aninat.