Judicial documentation constitutes one of the richest, most complex and most versatile bodies of documents for the study of the History of the Americas. For decades, the growing number of studies based on this type of source has revealed not only its extraordinary informational potential but also its capacity to offer new perspectives on classic problems and to open up lines of research that until recently were scarcely explored.
\nThe documents generated by the various bodies of justice administration make it possible to approach knowledge of political and judicial institutions, mechanisms of government, social relations, economic activities, everyday conflicts, forms of control and negotiation of power, collective identities, and cultural and religious practices, as well as the experiences of those groups that usually appear more sparsely in other types of documentary sources. Their thematic richness makes judicial sources a privileged tool for studying colonial and republican America from institutional, legal, economic, social, cultural, political, gender, ethnic and territorial approaches.
\nThis symposium proposes to bring together research that shares as a common element the use of judicial documentation for the historical reconstruction of American societies. Our interest is not limited to analyzing the content offered by these sources, but also seeks to incorporate a broader reflection on the information units that preserve them (archives, documentation centers or libraries), the processes of documentary organization and description, the formation of collections, problems of access and preservation, the regulatory frameworks governing their management, as well as the possibilities offered by new technologies for their processing and dissemination.
\nProposals will be accepted on judicial institutions, ordinary and special courts, ecclesiastical, inquisitorial, military or administrative justice, legislation, legal culture, procedural practices, judicial archives, cataloging and digitization projects, comparative studies and methodological analyses derived from work with this type of documentation. Likewise, the symposium seeks to generate a space for discussion of the main results achieved by recent research and of the challenges currently faced by those working with judicial sources in Americanist studies.
\nThe fundamental objective is to foster encounters among specialists who, from different disciplines, chronologies and geographic areas, share similar methodological concerns and use sources of a comparable nature. The diversity of accumulated experience makes it possible to enrich analytical perspectives, promote the exchange of working tools, and move toward a broader understanding of American societies through documentation whose relevance continues to grow within historical research.
\nThis symposium already has a well-established track record within the International Congresses of Americanists. Since its first edition at the 54th ICA (Vienna, 2012), it has been continuously present in successive editions, bringing together researchers from multiple countries and habitually establishing itself as one of the symposia with the largest number of participants and papers presented. This continuity reflects both the vitality of studies based on judicial sources and this space’s capacity to generate academic debates of international scope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[62],"class_list":["post-10703","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-historia"],"yoast_head":"\n