The symposium “Regenerating Hope: Local Voices, Visitor Perspectives and Shared Futures” calls for research on places that, after having been marked by conflicts, violence, inequalities, stigmas, urban crises, heritage disputes or socio-environmental wounds, build new possibilities for collective life through processes of memory, urban regeneration, tourism, art, culture, social innovation, community participation and technological mediations.
The panel proposes to discuss the relationship between the voices of those who inhabit territories and the perspectives of those who visit, study, narrate, tour, photograph, consume or interpret them from outside. This relationship can generate recognition, symbolic reparation, intercultural learning, redistribution of value and the construction of shared futures; but it can also produce narrative simplification, spectacularization of pain, touristification, gentrification, cultural appropriation or the exclusion of local communities.
Papers will be received on Latin American, American or global experiences related to working-class neighborhoods, favelas, communes, historic centers, rural territories, memory sites, heritage landscapes, post-conflict cities, recovered public spaces, cultural routes, community museums, regenerative tourism initiatives, urban art projects, digital archives, transmedia narratives and territorial governance processes.
The purpose of the symposium is to compare cases and approaches that make it possible to understand how territories in transformation narrate their memories, negotiate outside perspectives and project fairer, more livable and more hopeful futures. In this sense, the regeneration of hope is not understood as a naive metaphor, but as a social, cultural, political and territorial practice oriented toward rebuilding bonds, redistributing value, caring for habitation and opening possibilities for a dignified life for communities historically affected by violence, oblivion or exclusion.
The symposium seeks to contribute comparative, ethical and methodological criteria for understanding how hope can be regenerated territorially when local voices and outside perspectives engage in dialogue without displacing the centrality of communities.
