The 2024 Global Spains Workshop on Conviviality and Accompaniment is a ten-day interdisciplinary workshop that introduces students to the ethics and methods of action-research in collaboration with grassroots organizations. The workshop focuses on non-extractive, collectivist modes of knowledge production and various models of organic intellectual praxis. This international workshop is sponsored by the UCSB Global Latinidades Center, Duke University’s Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South, and Madrid’s grassroots organization YoSoyElOtro, and emphasizes global transatlantic approaches to various ethnic and area studies–Latina/o/e/x, Latin American, Global, and allied and intersecting fields. This partnership brings together US students with Spanish faculty and grassroots cultural arts and social movement organizers in Madrid at a transformative moment in southern European and hemispheric contexts.

Participants will meet at La Parcería, a migrant grassroots organization near the Lavapiés neighborhood to examine questions that link the legacies of Francoism to the contemporary moment. Through morning provocatorios, they will explore the following questions:

How does “Global Spains” as a conceptual site expand our understanding of Global South interstitial geographies? And how do submerged and emerging practice-based initiatives reframe, reimagine or interrupt the normative narratives and archives in Spain? What kind of praxis might emerge through the configuration of collaborative spaces across research and activism? What kinds of knowledge and action can we generate across the multiple interstices (global/local, academic/grassroots) in Global Spains?

Participants will take part in exploring these ongoing questions through a series of practical sessions and hands-on activities that include creative workshops, critical tours, and site visits. Among the collaborators are Traficantes de Sueños, Servicio Activo Doméstico, Todxlapraxis, Universidad Feminista, Colectivo Ayllú, EspacioAfro, SOS Carabanchel, and Ateneo la Maliciosa.

This initiative involves informational sessions, site visits with local organizations, and dialogic activities that revolve around the long legacy of community organizing in Spain during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Workshop thematic clusters include exile and migration, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ecocide and critical environmentalisms, all with attention to class-based inflections. Global Spains connects contemporary processes to historical legacies from WWII, the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), and post-dictatorship formations as well as sociopolitical and cultural movements. Nearly four decades of Franco’s repression was complemented by historical occlusions. Spain’s constitutional monarchy is based on a white-washing of history that centers around a model democracy, one with a supposed resolution that many other Latin American and Southern European nations were encouraged to emulate. Going beyond Spanish exceptionalism and its democratic pacts of forgetting, Global Spains emphasizes the transnational dimensions of contestatory historiographies from below created through collaborative challenges to power. Spain, a central and transient hub of Global South migrations, including African, Latin American, and Asian diasporas, is undergoing fluid transformations and configurations that are disorienting normative understandings of national attachments. Global Spains offers a unique opportunity to work and expand on temporal, linguistic, visual, architectural, embodied, living archives.