International Colloquium “Politics and Pandemics: transdisciplinary views on dilemmas of the earthly city”

Pandemics have always filled and haunted human history. However, contemporaneity forces us to rethink ancient problems and face new challenges. Almost without realising it, the 21st century began marked by a set of problems that not only showed a clear fragility for pandemic threats, but also diluted these threats in “Earthly Cities” amid a mixture of fragmented cultures and policies, showing both the absence of a deep conviction in linear and infinite techno-scientific progress and a deep inability to draw thoughts and policies based on a Common purpose. The long cycles of history which have somehow accomplished the “microbial unification of the planet”, with the many conquests and colonisation movements, leading to the import and export of men, animals, plant species and epidemics of unknown origins to entire peoples, cannot be overlooked.

The Research Centre in Political Sciences – CICP, in partnership with the Research Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology – CIESAS.CONACYT, decided to organize this colloquium in order to reflect on the issues that are intersecting at political, historical, economic, social and cultural levels, and against the background of the administration of life and death, growth and decrement, human rights as a constellation of values that require new perspectives in the ways of looking at the political system, the need for new or reshaped public policies, new ways of looking at human/nature relationships, the governance of complex societies, globalisation at various levels and speeds.