Call for Papers - SLAS Panel

We would like to invite abstracts for the following panel for the Society for Latin American Studies conference to be held at the University of Bristol on 10-11 April 2025:

Across Latin America and the Caribbean, communities have organised themselves to respond to ‘natural’ disasters and slow forms of violence via mechanisms of mutual aid and autogestión. These local responses not only fill the void left by government or NGO support, which often arrives late (or not at all) and may indirectly (or actively) reproduce vulnerability and marginalisation. Rather, communities can also foster or enact ways of being that reach beyond the putative ‘post’ of conventional recovery, via creativity and/or activism. In doing so, they build alternative futures that we might refer to as ‘decolonial ecologies’. Against the colonial and environmental double fracture (Ferdinand 2022), these responses value local populations’ knowledges and recognise human/non-human interdependence to work towards sustainability, self-determination, and self-sufficiency.

This panel explores community initiatives that seek neither a ‘return to normal’ nor to ‘build back better’ in a way that would reinforce racio-colonial capitalism (Bonilla 2020). In particular, it aims to foreground examples that complicate notions of recovery by emphasising its slow, uneven, and ongoing nature (Mika & Kelman 2019), as well as its relationship to creativity, activism, and/or self-representation. Focusing on the specific contexts of Latin America and the Caribbean, it asks: How do instances of community self-organisation and collaboration reorganise and reconfigure relationships to human and non-human nature? What is the relationship of communal recovery to activism? What roles do creativity and self-representation – via storytelling, filmmaking, and other collective practices – play in responding to environmental disaster and degradation? What alternative futures do these community initiatives envision or build?

Please send abstracts (250 words maximum), plus basic information such as affiliation and career stage, to convenors Dunja Fehimović (dunja.fehimovic@newcastle.ac.uk) and Cecilia Sosa (sosaceci@gmail.com) no later than 7 October 2024.

Last modified: Thu, 05 Sep 2024 13:47:39 BST