Bienvenidos/as, boas-vindas, and welcome back to the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies! This issue of the HCIAS Newsletter features information on a current call for applications, the newest HCIAS publications, courses offered by the HCIAS during the upcoming summer semester, and the latest scientific presentations given by HCIAS scholars.
Content
Call for applications
Academic programs
Events
Publications

Call for Applications: 3 scholarships for doctoral candidates
The Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies together with the Heidelberg Center Latin America in Santiago de Chile, is inviting young scholars to apply for one of three scholarships to pursue a doctorate in interdisciplinary Ibero-American Studies at Heidelberg University. These scholarships are to be granted by the Landesgraduiertenförderung of the State of Baden-Württemberg and will support doctoral candidates in conducting their research projects within the framework of the HCIAS doctoral research group “Communication and Society in Ibero-America”. Deadline: May 26, 2022.
Further information

CS@Ibero-America
Within the framework of this project, researchers and lecturers from the HCIAS, the Heidelberg Center Latin America (HCLA) at Heidelberg University, the Universidad de Chile (Instituto de la Comunicación e Imagen) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Facultad de Letras) are developing blended learning courses around the topic of "Intercultural Communication Management" for students of the participating national and international master's programs. This will promote a new blended mobility pattern and further expand the curricular offerings of these study programs.

Upcoming online course: "Gestión de la comunicación social e intercultural", starting on 21 April.
Registration now open!

HCIAS Junior Professor Pablo Porten-Cheé participated in the Virtual Seminar Series Latinx Digital Media at Northwestern University, Illinois, USA on April 7th. In his contribution Digital citizenship in flux: Theoretical and empirical approaches helping to understand today´s digital political participation of citizens, he discussed the formation of discursive citizenship norms among Latinx in the US.
Click here to watch the presentation.

HCIAS research associate Michael Imre presented the paper Intra-Party Heterogeneity and Voter Perceptions of Party Positions, coauthored by HCIAS Junior Professor Alejandro Ecker, at the Annual Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference on April 8th. Using textual data from Twitter to estimate the positions of political parties, the authors show how voters’ misperceptions of party positions increase as the positions of the party elite become more heterogeneous. 

Argentina. Debates and Consensus in a Post-bipartisan Congress
HCIAS Junior Professor Alejandro Ecker and Martin Soto Payva (University of Santa Fe, Argentina) contribute to the volume The Politics of Legistaltive Debates, edited by Hanna Bäck, Marc Debus and Jorge M. Fernandes for Oxford University Press (2021). Their paper analyzes how institutional factors and informal provisions influence the political legislative debate in Argentina.

Lithium in Mexiko Zwischen Verstaatlichung, Spekulation und Konfusion
This new contribution to the latest issue of the iz3w magazine by Rafael Hernández Westpfahl, HCIAS fellow of the Landesgraduiertenförderung of the State of Baden-Württemberg, and Rosa Lehmann, HCIAS Junior Professor, discusses the conflicting public and private interests involved in the recently discovered lithium reserve in Mexico.

Paradigms Lost. New opportunities for transformation?
Peter Thiery, senior research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University, associated researcher of the HCIAS, and BTI regional coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, has published this regional BTI 2022 report. The text analyzes the results of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index BTI 2022 regarding Latin America and the Caribbean. It describes the dynamics and state of the political and economic transformations which have occurred in the region between 2019 and 2021, considering the effects of the pandemic and social protests.
Take a look!

New Working Paper
Quarantine Aesthetics – Reflections on Arts, Visualities and Body Experience in the Era of Covid-19, by Miriam Oesterreich (Universität der Künste Berlin, Germany) is the latest HCIAS Working Paper published in the Special Series on the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper discusses the entanglements of the arts, visualities, and body experience in times of Covid-19 and the aesthetics created alongside the pandemic in Latin America. 
Check it out!