SLAS

By Bernardo de La Vega Vinolo, Oxford Brookes University Within one of the wealthiest regions of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, echoes of historically silenced voices reverberate. While geographically central, their bodies-territories remain located at the social margins, producing counter-hegemonic practices that have long resisted epistemic dominance, social injustice, and the enduring effects of necropolitical structures (Fig. 1). Yet these resistances have never occurred silentl

My name is Andrea Miranda, a Mexican-American practice-based PhD researcher at Falmouth University. I am on a journey anchored by horizons, incompletions, and eternal narratives. Growing up across cultural distances created a dialogue shaped by longing—one that pulled me inward, toward my own pluralities. These fractured narratives revealed gaps of the unknown: a language of sinkholes, reflective pools, porous identities, and underground river systems silently moving beneath

Three months ago, I was staring at three conference programmes on my laptop, trying to decide which one I could afford with limited funding. The answer, realistically, was none of them. So, I self-funded the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS 2026) conference. Leeds was the closest option. It was also the one where I had no friends waiting, no emotional pull to the city, no guarantee of anything beyond a name tag and a two-day programme. What I was looking for was some

Dr. Elisabeth Goemans In July and August 2026, I will travel to Argentina to visit various literary festivals and book fairs as part of my postdoctoral project on cultural sociology, book studies, and environmental humanities, generously funded by the SLAS 2026 Postdoctoral Award. In this blog post, I explore a few dimensions of Argentinian book festival culture that inform and shape my research. With around 150 book fairs and festivals taking place each year (Argentina.gob.a

By Lourdes ‘Lou’ Parra Lazcano University of Aberdeen This project explores the longstanding relationship between traditional healers, curanderxs, and plants in Latin America, particularly within Mexican healing traditions. Curanderxs understand plants not as passive resources but as members of an extended ecological family. They care for them, communicate with them, and recognise them as active agents in health and healing. By placing plants at the centre of healing narrativ