Fall Annual Conference

Call for Proposals

The New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) invites proposals to participate in our annual meeting at Wellesley College on Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7, 2026.

At a moment marked by shifting migration regimes, challenges to democratic institutions, and urgent questions about justice and belonging, the conference will provide an opportunity for our community to engage in dialogue across fields, methodologies, and geographies, reflecting on these challenges, as well as the diverse experiences, cultural expressions, and political struggles that have shaped and continue to impact the Latin American and Latinx worlds. Latin American and Latinx communities move, organize, create, and imagine across borders—geographical, linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary. This conference invites participants to explore how these communities:

• inhabit and transform social, cultural, and political spaces;
• generate new forms of knowledge and expression across languages and regions;
• resist structural violence and assert rights through artistic, legal, and community based strategies;
• build solidarities across nations, identities, and generations
• mobilize popular sentiment through public protest and disruptive action.

Areas of Focus
We welcome work from all scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, the “hard sciences”, multidisciplinary work that transcends the traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as from artists, community organizers, and practitioners whose work intersects with these themes.

We especially welcome work that engages:
• multilingualism, language justice, and translation as cultural and political practices
• literatures of migration, diaspora, resistance, and belonging
• film, performance, music, and visual arts as sites of memory and critique
• Indigenous, Afro Latin American, and diasporic aesthetic traditions
• histories of (neo)colonialism and (neo)empire
• migration histories and diasporic networks across the Américas
• gendered and queer histories of activism, labor, and community building
• territorial struggles, environmental change, and human rights movements
• contemporary migration regimes, borders, and mobility
• gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ rights in community, legal, and policy contexts
• environmental justice, extractivism, and climate driven displacement
• social movements, community organizing, and transnational solidarities

Submission Formats
• individual papers
• full panels
• roundtables
• workshops or community engaged sessions
• creative or multimodal presentations
We encourage participation from graduate students, early career researchers, senior scholars, independent researchers, artists, educators, and community activists.

Founded in 1970, NECLAS is an inclusive community that welcomes scholars, researchers, teachers, activists, students, and the general public with interests in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino/a/x Studies. Focused on the New England region, NECLAS works to encourage more effective training, teaching, and research related to Latin American and Latino/a/x issues, while facilitating exchanges within the region through lectures, fora, seminars, conferences, prizes, and publications.

Please submit your abstracts and proposals by June 1, 2026. Presenters must be members of
NECLAS.

Please submit a membership fee and conference fee in order to participate in the conference.