Without Borders. Meeting of Mexican and Spanish Scientists

The UNAM headquarters in Spain organizes a biennial meeting of Mexican and Spanish scientists called Sin fronteras (Without Borders). The first edition took place in 2022, at a particularly complicated time for collaborative work given the immobility imposed on the world by the pandemic. In those difficult years, borders multiplied and took new forms, and in a blink of an eye became part of our daily environment, restricting us on several fronts: not only inside the limits of our cities or neighborhoods, of the places where we work, study, or rest, but also in unforeseen and suffocating boundaries that came to reality in a mask or a latex pair of gloves we had to wear, and that put us on the other side of the border of even kisses and hugs. In this scenario of borders, relations between international colleagues were bound to change. For the worse at first, but for the better later. The prominent science communicator José Gordon, a participant in the meeting, put it this way: 
   
With the intention of keeping such positive inertia up and being aware of the importance of face-to-face meetings—especially after the isolation of previous years—the UNAM-España Center for Mexican Studies held the first Sin fronteras meeting in Madrid along with Fundación Casa de México en España and Fundación Ramón Areces, and with the support of the UNAM Scientific Research Head Office and the UNAM Cultural Dissemination Head Office in Mexico. 

That way, face to face and with no screens in between, scientists from different areas of UNAM met with their peers in Spain. They came from different institutions and regions, such as Valencia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and the Canary Islands, the latter, an archipelago from where specialists of the Canarias Institute of Astrophysics came to talk with their colleagues from UNAM’s Institute of Astronomy about “Astrophysics and technology between Mexico and Spain”, with special emphasis on the joint project of the Great CANARIAS Telescope. In addition to this roundtable, there were many others on specific joint collaboration projects in fields such as neurosciences, mathematics, geology, physics, astrobiology, and engineering. 

Its initial success led to the second edition scheduled for 2024, incorporating new venues and collaborating institutions, including the Ortega-Marañón University Research Institute, the Cervantes Institute, and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), as well as UNAM’s Humanities Head Office. This allowed enriching the conversation by including social sciences and strengthening the connection between Mexican and Spanish academic communities in scientific and humanities fields, making scientific collaboration and joint research visible, and encouraging others in the academic community—especially young people—to explore the opportunities of international work. 

Beyond the disseminative impact of Sin fronteras, the participants agreed on the virtues of coexisting and interacting with colleagues from other fields in a multidisciplinary meeting of this kind where, over several days, different spheres, apparently unrelated to each other, converge. In this way, in addition to strengthening academic relations between countries and ties between peers, meetings such as this are privileged spaces that, by diluting borders, allow other fields to permeate and incite interaction with them, not only encouraging international but also interdisciplinary collaborations. As the activities went on, one table’s topics influenced the following ones, generating a dynamic flow of ideas and collaboration. This way, networks do not only get wider, but more diverse, rich, and complex too. 

Thus, as stated in the program of the second meeting, guided “between physics and medicine, nanoparticles or music, neurons and health, public policies in territorial planning, emotions, massive data, light and photonic sciences, culture, or great debates of our century such as polarization, populism, and post-truth in social media” (Fundación Ramón Areces, 2024), the specialists invited to Sin fronteras shared with each other and with the audience the processes, challenges, satisfactions, and results of an international teamwork that seeks to make knowledge flow without borders in a global context in which mutual understanding, constructive collaboration, and collective thinking are of utmost importance to face today’s challenges. 

The roundtables of the first two editions are available on UNAM-España’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/UNAMEspa%C3%B1a). What you won’t be able to find there are the informal conversations held in the corridors, the talks with the audience during the breaks, or the exchanges of ideas with students on the way from one venue to another. These dialogues, full of enthusiasm and mutual learning, enrich each edition of Sin fronteras, so everyone is welcome to attend the next one.

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