Chispa Videocast — a talk show about the backstage work in legal history research

Forschungsprojekt

Chispa Videocast is an interview-based talk show about the backstage work in legal history research conceived as an academic communication project and a public-history undertaking. It offers a curated space in which research is discussed not only through its results, but through its making: the intellectual impulses, material encounters, methodological decisions, and institutional conditions that shape scholarly work in legal history and legal theory. Hosted by Karla Escobar and Raquel Sirotti, the series brings together colleagues from the Department Historical Regimes of Normativity and visiting researchers for sustained conversations about how projects begin, how questions are refined, and how archives, concepts, and scholarly communities co-produce knowledge.

A distinctive aim of the project is to make visible the practical knowledge of archival research: the craft and skills and situated knowledge and competencies that often remain implicit in published scholarship. Episodes explore how researchers navigate archival classifications, gaps, and silences; how they work with often fragile material and partial series; how they read across genres of legal documentation; and how they translate heterogeneous records into historically and theoretically meaningful claims. Attention is also given to the social and logistical dimensions of research (access regimes, institutional constraints, linguistic mediation, and the ethical challenges of handling sensitive collections). In this sense, Chispa functions as a forum for reflecting on archives as spaces of negotiation and on historical work as a form of skilled practice, shaped by experience, judgment, and learned routines.

Faithful to the linguistic diversity of the Institute’s community, Chispa adopts a multilingual approach. Episodes alternate between Portuguese and Spanish and include English subtitles, extending accessibility and reinforcing the transnational character of the research environment. This commitment to multilingualism also informs the project’s outreach and community-building efforts on social media, where Portuguese, Spanish, Portuñol, and English are used as working languages that reflect the Institute’s intellectual and cultural plurality.

Chispa launched on 17 February and publishes one episode every two weeks. The first season comprises ten episodes. All episodes are freely available online on YouTube and Spotify, supporting open access to academic dialogue and enabling circulation beyond institutional boundaries.