POVERTY, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES AND PUBLIC POLICY: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES IN LATIN AMERICA.
Latin America continues to be one of the most unequal regions in the world, despite the progress achieved in recent decades in reducing poverty, expanding social protection, and recognizing rights. The persistence and reproduction of social inequalities nevertheless reveal the limits of approaches that analyze poverty exclusively through monetary indicators, material deprivation, or social categories considered in isolation. Latin American experiences show that processes of impoverishment and vulnerability are shaped by complex relationships among class, gender, race, ethnicity, territory, generation, migration, labor, and care responsibilities, whose interconnections produce differentiated forms of access to resources, rights, opportunities, and public policies.
The symposium proposes to bring together theoretical, empirical and comparative research dedicated to analyzing poverty and inequalities from intersectional and multidimensional perspectives, with special attention to the contemporary challenges faced by public policy in Latin America. It seeks to promote a space for dialogue among different disciplinary fields, methodological approaches, and national and subnational experiences, fostering the circulation of research capable of examining both the structural dimensions of inequalities and their manifestations in the trajectories, experiences and concrete living conditions of different social groups.
Contributions on monetary and multidimensional poverty; gender, race, ethnic, class and territorial inequalities; feminization of poverty; the economy and social organization of care; social protection; cash transfer programs; labor, informality and precarization; territorial inequalities; migrations and displacement; differentiated access to public services; processes of production, implementation and evaluation of public policy; social indicators and poverty measurement systems; as well as research on individual, family and community strategies developed in response to contexts of inequality and vulnerability, will be welcome.
The symposium also seeks to stimulate critical reflection on the capacities and limits of public policy to respond to social problems produced by the articulation of multiple inequalities. It is particularly interested in discussing to what extent the categories, measurement instruments, and targeting mechanisms used by Latin American states allow for the identification of the heterogeneity of poverty experiences or, on the contrary, contribute to rendering certain populations, territories, and forms of inequality invisible.
Through the exchange among different theoretical, methodological and territorial perspectives, the symposium aims to contribute to building a Latin American research agenda on poverty, intersectional inequalities, and public policy, strengthening the dialogue between academic production and contemporary debates on social protection, distributive justice, recognition of differences, and the reduction of inequalities in the region.
