PILAS Conference 2026
“Future Archives: Forging the Next Generation of Latin American Studies"
8th April 2026 | University of Leeds, England
Click here for the original Call for Papers.
Scroll below for information about the Conference.
Keynote speaker
Professor Thea Pitman
Professor Thea Pitman is Professor of Latin American Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds, UK. She specialises in Latin American digital cultural production, with a particular focus on race, ethnicity and gender and the ways in which these shape digital (self-)representation.
Her publications include Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature (Liverpool University Press, 2007), Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (Routledge, 2013), and Decolonizing the Museum: The Curation of Indigenous Contemporary Art in Brazil (Tamesis, 2021).
Since 2023, she has been working on the AIAI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity project and the INDIGENIA: Generative AI for Indigenous Futures and ‘Digital Good Living’ projects, developed in collaboration with the Brazilian NGO Thydêwá and Indigenous artists, writers, community leaders and traditional knowledge holders in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile. Together with Sandra de Berduccy and Andreas Rauh, she has co-edited the forthcoming volume Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity: Between Dreams and Hallucinations (University of London Press, 2026).
Visit Thea's institutional page here.
Keynote speaker
Dr Pedro Mendes Loureiro
Pedro Mendes Loureiro is the Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS) and Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). Primarily a political economist, at the heart of his work is a commitment to interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, with interests ranging wide across the social sciences.
Substantively, Pedro is a scholar of inequality and of development strategies, with the ultimate goal of helping combat social inequalities in all their forms and wherever they might arise. He has researched and published on the political economy of development strategies in Latin America; on the changing dynamics of race, class and gender inequality; on social policies and their politics; on inequality measurement; and on the history of Latin American social thought.
Pedro's current research focusses on the expansion of the prison system and the political economy of incarceration in Brazil.
Visit Pedro's institutional page here.
Film screening
When Cumbia is On
Paz Gonzales, 2024
When Cumbia is On follows the journey of Peruvian Cumbia as it transcends its Latin American origins to find a new home in Scotland. Through the stories of South American musicians like Sandino, Chile, and Franco, the film explores how this music genre becomes a bridge for reconnecting with their cultural roots, offering a sense of belonging in a foreign land.
Paz Gonzales is a visual storyteller and communications specialist based in Edinburgh. Her work traces how individual stories inhabit and shape shared worlds. Through documentaries, photography and creative forms, she foregrounds narratives that connect intimate experiences with broader collective realities, engaging with gender, environmental and social issues.
She has developed audiovisual and communication projects for United Nations agencies like UNICEF and UNDP, as well as international organisations including Inter-American Development Bank, CARE, DESCO and Action Against Hunger.
Film screening
The Musical Valley
Jérémie Voirol, 2023
The film "The Musical Valley: Otavalo Indigenous Musicians at the Crossroads of Transnational Circulations" shows diverse musical practices of Indigenous musicians from the region of Otavalo, in the Ecuadorian Andes. It emphasises the circulations of people, sounds, ideas, and objects and how these circulations shape the contemporary practices of Otavalo Indigenous musicians. In this way, several fundamental topics in Otavalos’ contemporary everyday life are addressed, such as migration, urbanisation, globalisation, technology, and the revalorisation of a local ‘culture’.
Jérémie Voirol has been a Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester since 2017. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the University of Applied Sciences, School of Social Work, in Fribourg, Switzerland. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, with a specialisation in cultural and social anthropology. He has carried out ethnographic research mainly in Ecuador, focusing on youth and music in urban contexts, on festive experiences and contemporary music practices in Indigenous rural areas, and on migration, the 'good life', and the 'bearable life'.
Important information
Location
University of Leeds Baines Wing
Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
Programme
Stay tuned for the final programme