Error 404: Democracy Not Found? Political Reconfigurations in the Americas
IV International Congress of Interamericanist Students
Title: Error 404: Democracy Not Found? Political Reconfigurations in the Americas
Location and Date: Bielefeld University, Germany — June 30 to July 2, 2025
The IV International Congress of Interamericanist Students brought together young researchers, professionals and scholars from Latin America and Europe around the central theme Error 404: Democracy Not Found?, which invited a critical reflection on the contemporary political reconfigurations taking place across the Americas.
The event featured keynote lectures by Santiago Castro-Gómez, who presented “For an Alternative Genealogy of Republicanism”; Ezequiel Bagnato (Patagonian University Institute of the Arts, Argentina), with “Political Communication, Digital Convergence, and Platforms: Dreams of Freedom or the Dissolution of Democratic Utopias?”; and Julia Roth (Bielefeld University, Germany), who delivered “Can Feminism Trump Populism? Right-Wing Extremist Contestations of Gender Rights and Intersectional Resistance in the Americas.”
The congress also included a lecture by Gerardo Gutiérrez Cham (University of Guadalajara, Mexico), titled “De-democratization in Latin America through Hate Speech on Social Media.”
The closing session was led by Sociologist Silvina Gorsky, specialist in migration, childhood, and human rights, with her presentation “Childhood and Care in Contexts of Mobility.” She participated in the panel “Migrations and Borders in the Democratic Reconfiguration of the Americas".
Over three days, the congress offered a series of panels addressing the crisis of democracy, political polarization, narratives of de-democratization, and migration processes, fostering an interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue among emerging and established researchers in the Interamerican field.
