Fall Annual Conference

Call for Proposal

The New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) warmly invites you to our annual meeting at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, MA, on Friday, November 10 and Saturday, November 11, 2023.

This year, the NECLAS conference seeks to explore the challenges and possibilities of bridging different modes of knowledge production across technological systems and cultures in Global Latin America and the Caribbean. This approach aims to provoke broader dialogues about the role of new methodological, epistemological, and socio-political frameworks needed to recognize, foster, and learn from multiple ways of knowing and doing. It aspires to highlight the role of Latin America and the Caribbean in local, transregional, and global processes to support linkages across scholarship andactivism within and beyond this region’s traditional geopolitical and cultural limits.

Topics of particular interest to this conference include, but are not limited to: (1) challenges of climate change adaptation strategies and climate reparations, and cultural production emerging from these strategies; (2) cultural politics of migrations and the circulation of bodies, knowledge, animals, plants, technological systems, policies, and responses to them; (3) roles of social media in social movements and democracy; (4) relations between technology and religion in emerging political ideologies and organizations; (5) how particular forms of knowledge and technology production enable or contest intersectional modes of oppression; (6) applications of scientific and technical expertise in the reproduction or addressing of sociocultural inequalities; (7) technologies of health, environmentalism, land use, and livelihoods; (8) community-led socio-technological innovations and responses to challenges in agriculture, energy, transportation, climate change, and conservation; (9) roles of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems in local and global politics; (10) lessons from the links between art, technologies, and activism in global governance; and (11) crossing literal and metaphorical borders in film, literature, and other cultural expressions.

The conference welcomes proposals outside the specific theme, including those related to U.S. Latino/a/x communities. Papers and panel presentations may be in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. We welcome submissions and proposals for posters, panels, roundtables, professionalization workshops, and book presentations from across disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, visual and plastic arts, sociocultural linguistics, and translation as well as from the fields of law, business, public policy, social work, public health, and education, among others. We especially encourage faculty members to organize undergraduate student panels based on capstone projects or theses that tackle relevant conference topics and issues.

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 send your abstracts and proposals to neclas.sec@gmail.com by July 15.

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