Received Sylff fellowship in 2023, 2024, 2025
Academic supervisor: Franciso Zapata, Nitzan Shoshan, Sandra Oceja, Aturo Rodíguez
Morató
Current affiliation: National Human Rights Center “Rosaio Ibara de Piedra,” National
Human Rights Commission, Mexico
Academic background: National Autonomous University of Mexico UNAM; El Colegio de México; predoctoral research stay at the Universitat de Barcelona
I am a Mexican sociologist, researcher, editor, lecturer, and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. My work brings together cultural sociology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, human rights, artistic worlds, and contemporary forms of subjectivity. I hold a BA in Sociology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an MA in Social Science with a specialization in Sociology from El Colegio de México. I also carried out a predoctoral research stay at the Universitat de Barcelona. I currently work as an editor at the National Human Rights Center “Rosaio Ibara de Piedra”, and provide psychotherapy with a psychoanalytic orientation while continuing my clinical training in psychoanalysis and neuropsychoanalysis.
With the support of the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, my research focused on inequality in contemporary poetry worlds between Mexico City, Barcelona, and Budapest. This project approached poetry not only as a literary practice, but as a social world shaped by institutions, affects, friendships, digital media, recognition, exclusion, and new forms of collective life. It combined ethnography, interviews, archival work, and participation in literary, artistic, and academic spaces.
My theoretical work is mainly grounded in Hatmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, Buno Latou ’s notion of assemblages, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School. I am also interested in recovering Susan Sontag as a major thinker for sociology, beyond her usual place as an at citic. These lines of work have led me to develop a psychoanalytic theory of light, focused on how people produce —or lose— ideals, desire, creativity, trust, symbolic vitality, and meaningful relations with the world. More recently, this has opened a dialogue with contemplative traditions, which informs my clinical practice.
My academic and public work has included research, teaching, editing, and lectures in institutions such as UNAM, UAM, El Colegio de México, the Universitat de Barcelona, the University of Buenos Aires UBA, UNAM, CLACSO, Fondo de Cultura Económica, The New York Times, and Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. I have worked on education, migration, Afghan refugees in Mexico, cultural policy, social movements, human rights, artistic training, and a participatory territorial and ecological planning project in Atenco, alongside community resistance processes defending water, land, and local life.
I am the author of "Una historia vivencial de la poesía: de las cavernas a TikTok. ¿Por qué la poesía nos ayuda a vivir mejor?" SEHER, 2023 and was recognized as a Guardian of Peace by the Embassy of India and the United Nations for an essay on nonviolence and childhood futures. Across my work, the central concern is to understand how inequality, alienation, symbolic violence, creativity, and the search for meaning shape the ways we live, suffer, create, and relate to others.
Email: shenandez@colmex.mx
Instagram: @elmundodesebaschan
