Tulane Home Tulane Shield logo linking to site home page

Conferences

International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association

2019

Tulane University Latin Americanists participate in LASA 2019

The 2019 International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from Thursday, May 24 until Monday, May 27, 2019. The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the world’s premier forum for expert discussion on Latin America and the Caribbean. LASA is the one association that brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors across the globe. The 2019 conference Nuestra América: Justice and Inclusion strives to invoke and expand the message of José Martí’s essay Nuestra América (1891) to promote a hemispheric vision of justice and inclusion. This year’s theme is of particular importance during an era when global politics is too often built around walls and securing borders and not on fostering social justice and democracy.

View the entire program here

2016

You can find the full 2016 LASA program here.

2010

The XXIX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association washeld in Toronto, Canada on October 6-9. Numerous Tulane faculty, staff and graduate students are participating in this year’s congress. For the convenience of conference attendants and participants, attached below are schedule listings for Tulane participants at LASA 2010. Also, please remember the reception, “Friends & Alumni of Tulane’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies” that will be held on Saturday night (Oct 9) from 8:30-10:00 PM at the Hilton in the Toronto Ballroom II. We look forward to seeing you at LASA!

LASA 2010 – Tulane Participants (schedule by date/time)
LASA 2010 – Tulane Participants (alphabetical listing)
LASA 2010 – Tulane Participants (full panel information by date/time)

Student Conferences

Tulane University Student Conference on Latin America (TUSCLA)

2019

The Stone Center’s annual TUSCLA conference is an interdisciplinary student symposium in which seniors from the Latin American Studies undergraduate core seminar, first-year graduate students in the graduate Latin American Studies core seminar and undergraduates in Newcomb-Tulane College conducting original research on Latin America present their individual research projects. TUSCLA was formally launched as TUCLA in Fall of 2003 as a means to provide Latin American Studies undergraduates with an opportunity to present papers in the style and atmosphere of an academic conference. In 2006 it was transformed into a public, all-day event with faculty discussants and in 2017 expanded into the current TUSCLA conference, to include graduate students and the wider undergraduate community. The conference is designed to enlist all Tulane undergraduates, graduate students and faculty interested in the region in a shared discussion of the region, its society and its cultures.

From the School of Liberal Arts: Student Conference on Latin America Celebrates 17th Anniversary

View the Full Program

View the Schedule

2018

Students participate in the XVI annual Tulane University Student Conference on Latin America

This interdisciplinary symposium is an opportunity for seniors from the Latin American Studies undergraduate core seminar, first-year graduate students in the graduate core seminar, and other undergraduates in Newcomb-Tulane College conducting original research on Latin America to present their individual research projects. 

View the program

Latin American Graduate Organization Conference 

2019: Entanglement and the Spaces in Between: Discourses and Processes of Hybridity in Latin America

Entanglement and the Spaces in Between: Discourses and Processes of Hybridity in Latin America included papers which engage with issues of hybridity not only as a defined product, but as an ongoing practice and a continuous process. The keynote address was given by Jeff Packman, University of Toronto, titled Tudo Mistura na Bahia: Hybridities, Intimacies, and Tactics of Musical Practice in Salvador, in the Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center 210 on Friday, February 1. The keynote was followed by a reception.

As several cultural critics  from Stuart Hall and Arjun Appadurai to Néstor Garcia Canclini, Avtar Brah, and Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn have shown, the contemporary world is characterized by transnational migrations, cultural appropriations, and diasporic experiences, all contributing to the collapse of the spheres of the local and the global. Cultural hybridity in Latin American locations and temporalities becomes a site for individuals or communities to negotiate and define their often marginalized positions and to challenge well-established hegemonic discourses and hierarchies. In Franz Fanon's definition, hybridity is never a specific moment but an ongoing struggle, a continual emergence, a "zone of occult instability." (1961)

As one of the long-reigning paradigms for understanding the cultural and symbolic practices of Latin America and its diasporic communities, hybridity has also been subjected to substantial critiques by as many scholars as those that originally proposed it as a model. These critiques invite us to think about the ways in which hybridity has historically facilitated colonial processes of domination as well as modern-day oppressive power dynamics. As well, critiques of hybridity have brought up the fallacy involved in thinking of hybridity as a "new" process, when, in fact, all of world history is characterized by unstable cultural formations, rather than "pure" cultural practices that then become "hybrid" through contact with others. Thus the term has rightly become a contested ideological ground in itself, one that calls for the examination of its critical assumptions. Globalization and technology have redefined longstanding binaries in the historiography of Latin America and challenged us to re-think important issues relating to democracy, cultural rights, and citizenship. As such, we consider it now more than ever a fitting time to re-examine and critique the usefulness of hybridity as a discursive method and process for action and activism. In which productive directions can we take this sometimes idealized framework, after its critiques have so soundly pointed out its problems?

The Tulane Latin American Graduate Organization's annual graduate conference will adopt an expansive perspective on both the advantages and drawbacks of the framework of "hybridity."

View the schedule here

 

Conferences hosted at Tulane

2018

Association for Academic Programs i Latin America and the Carribbean Conference (AAPLAC)

The Association for Academic Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean (AAPLAC) will hold its 29th Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, February 21-24, 2018, hosted by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University.

AAPLAC is an organization that facilitates and supports study abroad programming among Latin American, Caribbean and US institutions of higher learning and organizations dedicated to the promotion of cross-cultural, academic-based experiences.

2017

Haitian Studies Association Conference

The Haitian Studies Association will hold its 29th Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, a site that offers scholars a look at how the "making of the people" occurs outside of the geopolitical spaces associated with a nation-state. Indeed, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 forced not only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also the migration of slaves, slave owners, and free blacks and mulattos between the two former French territories. These movements of people led to the creation of new spaces where migrants linked to an emergent Haiti would become part of a new North American dynamic also characterized by inequalities and exclusion.

The Haitian Studies Association seeks a diverse set of scholarly interrogations of these themes from disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. We are especially interested in fully constituted panels, and will prioritize panels that speak directly to our themes and attempt an interdisciplinary dialogue.

View the program here.

2016

Tropical Exposures: Photography, Film, and Visual Culture in a Caribbean Frame

Tropical Exposures is a forum in which to peruse and absorb the visual turn in contemporary inquiry from the unique vantage points of the Caribbean, circum-Caribbean and Caribbean diasporas. We conceive the tropical exposure as a frame for representing the region’s strengths and vulnerabilities and for questioning the interaction of Antillean sensibilities with a plethora of images and mediascapes. Our invited keynote speaker is photographer Virginia Beahan.

Tropical Exposures welcomes proposals for papers that address any facet of Caribbean visual representation in photography, film, art, popular culture, and other media, as well as the interaction of word and image more generally. Scholars are also encouraged to present proposals that consider social and cultural shifts toward the increasing intermediality of representation in the Caribbean frame.

View the schedule here

2013

Radical Caribbeans Conference 

This conference proposes to explore the roots of Caribbean life and culture, but from a "radical" perspective, invoking the word's usage as "a change or action relating or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough." Rather than approaching the greater Caribbean through its metropolises or  mainstream critical apparatuses, a radical perspective of the Caribbean entails restaging our analytical perspectives to look at Caribbean life and culture through alternative prisms that disconnect, reconnect and electrocute how the region has traditionally been framed. The conference's impetus is to push the boundaries of what and how we understand the Caribbean, beyond the glittering facade of the lettered city and its grounded denizens onto other landscapes that have always been in its shadow and the travelers that configure its outer parameters.

Conference participants included academics from disciplines as diverse as Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, as well as independent scholars, fiction writers and journalists. The diversity of the backgrounds of conference participants strengthened the intentions and mission of the conference to explore the roots of Caribbean life and culture through a radical perspective that disconnects and reconnects how the region has traditionally been framed.

View bios of the panelists here 

View the conference program here

2009

Geographical Imaginaries and Hispanic Film Conference 

From November 4th through the 6th, with the support of Tulane University and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, the Geographical Imaginaries and Hispanic Film conference was held in New Orleans. Itself a paradigmatic space of cultural flows, connections and exchanges, a territory whose history and identity have been shaped and determined by travel and geographic imaginations, New Orleans drew scholars from both North and South America as well as Europe and the Caribbean to join together to examine the crossings and interrogations of geographical borders in Spanish, Latin American and U.S. Latino cinema. Conference participants spoke on diverse topics of space in Hispanic Cinema from urban cartographies and televisual frontiers to memory, myth, modernity and politics in global, transnational and local spaces, those that are concrete as well as imagined. Issues of gender and sexuality and Diaspora and borders were discussed alongside technical and visual aspects of this cinema. 

Brief Film Overviews

To view more pictures of the event, please visit the Stone Center's Flickr page.

Cuba: 50 Years of Revolution Conference

On Friday, November 13th, the conference Cuba: 50 Years of Revolution was held on Tulane's uptown campus in the Greenleaf Conference Room at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Members of Tulane's Latin Americanist community were joined by national and international scholars and academics to discuss Cuban politics, economics, environmental issues, race and relations with the United States. Tulane Latinamericanists who presented at the conference included: Associate Provost Ana M. López, Communication; Greenleaf Distinguished Professor in Latin American Studies, Carmelo Mesa-Lago; Executive Director of the Center for Inter-American Policy & Research, Ludovico Feoli; Nora Lustig, the Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics; Tony Pereira, Political Science; Oliver Houck, Law; CIPR Research Fellow Paolo Spadoni; Rosanne Adderley, History; and the Executive Director of the Stone Center, Tom Reese.

View more photos from the conferences on the Stone Center’s Flickr site.

 

Other Conferences

2020

Gilder Lehrman Center's International Conference: Cuban Slavery and the Atlantic World

Cuban Slavery and the Atlantic World

The Gilder Lehrman Center's 22nd Annual International Conference provides a forum for discussion of the study of Cuban slavery and emancipation today, placing the island's history within the wider Atlantic world. Over the past few decades, the study of Cuban history has been an increasingly international effort. Cuban historians have interacted more and more with colleagues from abroad, with discussions grounded in the unique primary sources found in the rich Cuban archives. These scholars have demonstrated the importance of understanding Cuban slavery within the context of the Atlantic world and broad colonial networks of domination and resistance. This conference brings together scholars from Cuba and abroad working on the transatlantic slave trade, resistance, systems of control, abolition and emancipation, and the memory and legacies of slavery in Cuba. This conference took place over Zoom. 

 

2017

Cultural Kinship Conference: Presented by the LA Creole Research Association

The Louisiana Creole Research Association hosted its 13th annual conference from October 20-22 in New ORLEANS, LA. The conference will explore the phenomenon of Creolization and identity that exists in both the Caribbean and in New Orleans and their common Creole culture. Learn how the influence of the St. Domingue immigrants in New Orleans bolstered that common Creole on the cusp of Americanization following the Louisiana Purchase. 

2017 Conference Schedule