Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at SUNY Stony Brook
13th annual graduate student conference
Friday, 25 April 2014
Stony Brook Manhattan (163 W 125th St # 1, New York, NY 10027)
CFP Deadline: 1 February 2014 via email to laconfestony@gmail.com
Keynote Speaker: *Brodwyn Fischer* (University of Chicago)
From the Call For Papers
Since the conquest, Latin America has been a distinctly urban region, and yet urbanization has always been a process fraught with ambiguity and
contradiction. From Pre-Columbian times, urban centers have served as central arenas for the contestation of political power, cultural
legitimacy, economic development, and social hierarchy. Latin America’s cities have stood at the nexus of regional and transnational forces. They
have served as both geographic and intellectual meeting places, where vibrant and often restive rural cultures have come into contact with forces
that reach well beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. As a result, scholars across the disciplines have long grappled with how to understand
urban space in Latin America.
This year’s theme, “Urban Explorations: Latin America’s Cities, Past & Present,” explores new avenues of research on the role of cities in Latin
America. Among the questions we ask are:
– What is the relationship between urban geography and the religious, social, political, economic and cultural landscape of Latin American
cities?
– How has cultural production in the Latin America’s cities evolved in the wake of historical, political, and social change?
– How has the city functioned as a site of violence, carried out by both state and non-state actors?
– How have urban spaces served to highlight questions of inequality along the lines of race, sexuality, class and gender?
– What new scholarly approaches can help us understand the country/city dichotomy in a context of new global networks that reach beyond the
nation-state?
– How do we analyze representations of the city in popular culture and political discourse? How have these shifting images of the urban space
been utilized in the advancement of different political projects and in the struggle for equality?
Presentation proposals should be 200 to 300 words in length, in either Spanish or English, and should include a cover page with name, academic
affiliation and contact information.
Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2014
Email: laconfestony@gmail.com <laconfestony@gmail.com>
Above adapted from CFP. For original CFP, as well as a version in Spanish, visit the conference website.
