PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
Homewood Campus, Baltimore, Maryland What kind of place is Latin America? As a geographic region, the urban, rural, natural and manmade landscapes and sites that make up Latin America have been shaped as much by struggles to define national territories, ethnic boundaries and social frontiers, as they have by the unceasing movement of people, commodities, capital and substances across the very borders and boundaries that regulate our imagination of place and location. By drawing our attention to movement, appropriations, and the traces left by social memory and material transformation, such flows of people, ideas, images and ideals challenge us to rethink the character of place and its attendant values of belonging, origin, formation and identity. For its Spring Conference “Constituting Places,” the Program in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University invites papers that examine the relationship between place, movement, transformation and belonging in Latin America from a variety of disciplinary and regional perspectives. Specifically, we invite scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to reflect on the importance of such concepts as place, location, movement, flow and flight in their research. How have migration, relocation and displacement inflected Latin American notions of home and belonging, or reconfigured the ways in which places are collectively imagined or represented? How have alternating patterns of privatization and nationalization reshaped cities, public spaces, regional economies, and national identities? In which ways are preconceived notions of “public” and “private” space unsettled by the transit and re-occupation of places? What sorts of “places” are created through the tropes of decadence, marginality, and abandonment that circulate in Latin American cultural and artistic life? How do the new information technologies used by organizations, movements and migrants reconfigure specific places? How do the notions of nation and national territory reflect long-distance imaginations of the idealized home both historically and in the present? How do movements of people, goods, and ideas resonate with official, popular and academic understandings of such spatializing concepts as territory, nation, community and population? In order to address these questions, papers might explore the uses, histories and representations of a variety of places including urban public spaces, rural communities, nations, public institutions, and indigenous territories; the appropriation, revaluing, reclamation and abandonment of neighborhoods and historic centers; the emergence and character of the interstitial places that invite social and cultural innovation; the imagination and creation of the liberated territories, autonomous regions and artistic spaces that continually challenge state sovereignty and the fixity of place; legal and illegal traffic of people, substances, commodities, ideas; the histories and politics of copyright, bio-prospecting, intellectual property and the migration of ideas; the literary, visual and technological representation of places, migratory flows, emplacement and dislocation. Please send title and a brief (200 word) abstract indicating the applicant's academic status, affiliation and contact information, by February 15 to plas@jhu.edu
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John Russell-Wood Program in Phone: 410.516.5488 |