CALACS conference – May 2027
Latin America and the Caribbean stand at a critical juncture. Across the region, democratic institutions face mounting pressure from authoritarian retrenchment, the erosion of citizens' rights, attacks on hard-won multicultural citizenship regimes, the rise of fundamentalist far-right movements, and resurgent populisms. These developments are increasingly enabled by lawfare, digital surveillance, transnational repression, and other forms of technology-driven authoritarian control. They unfold amid a wider geopolitical reconfiguration, marked by intensified United States influence, evolving regional security doctrines, and the continued entrenchment of extractivist and neo-extractivist models of accumulation. The Caribbean, in particular, sits at the center of converging and often contradictory pressures: the accelerating climate crisis, unresolved demands for reparatory justice, and uneven efforts toward regional integration. Together, these forces create a moment of acute vulnerability but also one of profound political possibility.
These pressures are being met by countervailing forces that are reshaping the region. Across rural, coastal, and urban settings alike, innovative practices of resistance, activism, and memory-making are redefining political and social life. Movements for oceanic justice and territorial defence, together with diverse ontological and epistemological traditions, challenge conventional understandings of development and politics and create space for alternative visions of collective life. Feminist and queer movements, as well as migrant and diasporic communities organizing across borders, are similarly redrawing the boundaries of political belonging and solidarity. Socio-territorial struggles are especially significant for their capacity to sustain collective action, mobilize action, and generate pedagogical and practical innovations over time.
These struggles are also waged on the terrain of memory itself. Hegemonic narratives — often constructed to legitimize state violence, dictatorship, and dispossession — are increasingly unsettled by clandestine, subaltern, and counter-hegemonic memories that contest official HIStories and demand accountability. The relationship among memory, plural memories and counter-memory accompanies a broader rethinking of justice. Movements are advancing pluri-jurisdictional and legally pluralist models — including Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community-based justice systems — that challenge the state's monopoly over what counts as justice and who holds the authority to administer it.
CALACS 2027 invites papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, book presentations and creative interventions that engage with this moment of rupture and reinvention. We warmly welcome participants from Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, and their diasporas — including established scholars, graduate students, early-career researchers, artists, activists, policymakers and practitioners. We are particularly interested in work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, engages non-academic and community-based knowledge, and experiments with new forms of scholarly and public engagement. We especially encourage new and emerging voices to bring their questions, methods, and perspectives into the conversation.
We welcome contributions on (but not limited to):
- Authoritarianism, lawfare, and digital surveillance
- Citizenship, rights, and multicultural regimes under threat
- S. hemispheric influence and regional security doctrines
- Climate crisis and environmental (in)justice in the Caribbean and in Latin America
- Reparatory justice and regional integration
- Oceanic justice and territorial defense
- Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and onto-epistemic worldviews
- Urban- rural relations, socio-spatial inequalities, and inter-connected struggles
- Feminist, queer, and migrant/diasporic organizing
- Socio-territorial struggles, memory, and pedagogies of resistance
- Hegemonic, clandestine/subaltern and counter-hegemonic memories; contested histories
- Legal pluralism and pluri-jurisdictional forms of justice
- Extractivism, neo-extractivism, and alternative development models
The CALACS congress will be hosted by our colleagues at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University in Toronto, Ontario, from May 13-15, 2027. Under the theme "Memory, Justice and the Reconfiguration of the Americas” the 2027 CALACS congress invites a critical reflection on how political orders, collective identities, territories and forms of justice are being contested and remade. We invite reflections that engage with pressing and interconnected dynamics that examine democratic reconfigurations, intersectional alliances, socio-territorial movements, Afro-Indigenous resistance, oceanic justice, feminist and queer mobilization, migration and diaspora, digital surveillance, transnational repression, and technology-driven authoritarianism. We encourage submissions attentive to the intersections of gender, race, class, generation, disability, sexuality, and legal status across the region and its diasporas.
We welcome submissions for individual papers, panels, workshops, roundtable conversations, book presentations, and artistic or research-creation works. Contributions from artists, filmmakers, performers, policymakers, activists, community knowledge holders and scholars working in creative and non-traditional formats are strongly encouraged. The principal working language of the conference will be English, but we will consider proposals for presentations in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese. Proposals must be submitted via this Google form by October 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm EST.
