SLAS

CfP: PILAS Conference 2026

“Future Archives: Forging the Next Generation of Latin American Studies"

8th April 2026  |  University of Leeds, England

 (Preceding the SLAS 2026 Conference: Memory Studies and Social Justice)

Submission via this form by Monday, 8 December 2025

The Postgraduates in Latin American Studies (PILAS) Network invites proposals for its 2026 Annual Conference, “Future Archives: Forging the Next Generation of Latin American Studies.”

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Building on SLAS’s engagement with memory, PILAS 2026 turns its gaze toward the future, exploring how emerging researchers are imagining, contesting, and shaping the worlds to come. The conference aims to foster dialogue across disciplines, methodologies, and creative practices, encouraging participants to reflect on the possibilities of futurity as a conceptual and political tool for thinking about Latin America’s future, but also about its past and present.

At a moment marked by political uncertainty, environmental degradation, and social transformations, the question of the future becomes both urgent and generative. How might Latin American studies based in the UK contribute to envisioning alternative modes of knowledge, coexistence, and justice? What can the region’s histories of resistance, organisation, creativity, and solidarity teach us about imagining the futures to come?

We propose the following questions as a starting point: 

• How can we think and (re)imagine scholarship within Latin America through the lens of futurity? 

• How do ongoing social, political, and environmental turmoil shape the ways we imagine what comes next? 

• What role do we, as researchers and practitioners, play in constructing those futures?

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Conference themes

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We welcome proposals that engage with imagination and innovation in and beyond Latin America, across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. Including in fields such as literature, film studies, digital humanities, social sciences, history, anthropology, sociology and different forms of creative practices. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

• Future archives, digital memory, and preservation practices

• Knowledge-making and decolonial research 

• Literature, narrative, and representations of futurity

• Climate crisis, extractivism, and environmental imaginaries

• Migration, mobility, and diasporic belonging

• Memory, justice, and intergenerational repair

• Social, cultural and economic history in the region

• Work, precarity and labour inequalities

• Trade unions, social movements and civil organisations

• Gender, sexuality, reproduction and embodied futurities

• Critical views on race and racism in Latin America

• Religion and social constructions

• Political identities, polarisation and authoritarian regimes

• Indigenous epistemologies and ancestral futures

• Media, popular culture, and the aesthetics of possibility

• Art, technology, and the politics of imagination

• Utopias, dystopias, and alternative modernities

Submissions Guidelines

We accept contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers, as well as artists, activists, and practitioners, working across all disciplines and methodologies within Latin American Studies. 

Submissions may take the form of: 

• Individual papers

• Full panel (with 3 to 4 papers)

• Creative interventions

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This should be indicated on the text of the abstract and on the form.

The link to submit a proposal is the following form.

Please include in your proposal:

• Title of the presentation

• Title of the panel (if applies)

• Abstract (max. 300 words)

• Name of presenter(s)

• Short bio (max. 50 words)

• Three keywords

• Institutional affiliation

• Email address

• Language (we accept presentations in Spanish, Portuguese, and English)

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Key dates:

• Deadline for abstracts: Monday, 8 December 2025

• Notification of acceptance: Friday, 16 January 2026

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We look forward to your participation and to creating an enriching space for critical dialogue and collaborative approaches!

For any further inquiries, please contact pilasconference@gmail.com.