The Desapariciones (Disappearances) project seeks to understand the ways in which the category of “desaparecido” (disappeared) circulates transnationally and contributes to manage, inhabitat and analyze different situations marked by catastrophe and loss.
This effort is concretized in two directions. On the one hand, the project seeks to understand the logic behind the transnational circulation of the category “desaparecido” and its present ubiquity in the management and population of situations of suffering. These situations exceed those that since the 2006 UN Convention have fallen the umbrella of the “forced disappearance of persons” legal type.
On the other hand, Disappearances seeks to elaborate strategies to analyze social life when it is traversed by catastrophe and loss, and when the the tools we have inherited to apprehend and manage identity, agency and meaning have exhausted their explanatory power. The team’s objective is to utilize the category of disappeared as a tool for the theoretical and methodological analysis of universes marked by strong processes of destructuring, deinstitutionalization and, in general, breakdown of meaning.
Disappearances is a project with a comparative, transdisciplinary (sociology, anthropology, philology, political science, law, social psychology), and multi-situated vocation. It is based on a qualitative research strategy, and tackles different cases among which are the disappeared in Colombia, undocumented in Mexico, stolen babies in Spain, seasonal workers in Spain, the trafficking in human beings, Schengen border, etc.