We live in a moment shaped by what might be called a New War Order, in which multiple, intersecting forms of violence and governance structure everyday life. These include the continued expansion of the War on Drugs, militarised border regimes and deportation infrastructures, environmental crisis and extractivism, gendered and racialised forms of harm, attacks on knowledge and academic freedom, and increasingly algorithmic and digital forms of control.

​

In this context, “war” is not limited to armed conflict. It operates as a distributed condition: a set of overlapping political, economic, epistemic, and technological logics that shape how life is lived, governed, and imagined. Yet alongside these formations, communities, movements, and cultural practices continue to generate forms of collective life, solidarity, and re-existencia—a term widely used in Latin American critical thought to describe survival as active transformation and refusal, not mere endurance.

This conference invites reflection on how such practices emerge and persist under these conditions. We are particularly interested in how scholars, artists, educators, and activists theorise and enact collective life in contexts marked by political crisis and structural violence, as well as how these dynamics are experienced across Latin America, Iberia, and diasporic formations, including the Latinx and wider transnational Americas.

​

We also welcome work that engages critically with key geopolitical formations shaping the contemporary Americas and beyond, including Puerto Rico’s colonial condition, Venezuela, Cuba, U.S. hemispheric strategies (including the American Shield), Spain’s role in European and global politics, and broader South–South, North–South, and transregional configurations of power.

​

The conference foregrounds transformative cultural, linguistic, pedagogical, and environmental practices through which people imagine, enact, and sustain collective life in conditions of crisis. It highlights scholarship emerging from peripheralised locations within the global academy and knowledge economy, and welcomes work that centres Indigenous and Afro-descendant epistemologies, subversive cultural practices, and emergent forms of pan-Latin Americanism in the shadow of contemporary right-wing political formations.

​

We are particularly interested in contributions that explore critical pedagogies and resistant vocabularies, including multilingual classroom practices, co-created curricula, and pedagogical tools that engage subaltern knowledges and challenge dominant epistemic regimes.

​

We welcome papers that critically address, among other topics:

● Migration politics and deportation networks, including U.S. immigration enforcement and transnational border regimes.
● The war on knowledge, including academic freedom under pressure in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe.
● U.S. hemispheric strategies, including the War on Drugs and the “American Shield,” and their geopolitical and economic implications.
● Geopolitical flashpoints, including Puerto Rico’s colonial condition, Venezuela, Cuba, sanctions, blockades, and contested sovereignties.
● Global far-right politics, digital mobilisation, algorithmic governance, and electoral influence across the Americas and Europe.
● War, genocide, and anti-war/solidarity movements in comparative and transregional perspective.
● Cultural, literary, and media practices that depict, interrogate, or generate re-existencia under conditions of violence.
● Gendered, racialised, and sexualised forms of oppression and collective life-making practices.
● Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and decolonial epistemologies of resistance, survival, and futurity.
● Comparative and transregional approaches to alliance, solidarity, and collective life under crisis.
● Pedagogic practices that interrogate and cultivate agency in the New War Order.
● Critical pedagogies that challenge epistemic violence and institutional constraint.
● Linguistic, discursive, and semiotic analyses of how the New War Order is constructed and contested.
● Multilingualism, translation, and resistant vocabularies in contexts of crisis.
● Social, cultural, and aesthetic analyses of the discourses shaping contemporary war and governance.

By bringing together these strands, the conference highlights the creative, agential, and transformative dimensions of collective life, showing how people across the Americas, Iberia, and diasporic contexts contest, rework, and sustain social and political worlds under conditions of structural and epistemic violence.

Papers and Proposals

We welcome proposals for individual papers and panels (of up to three presenters) addressing the themes above and others engaging with the broad conceptual frame of the conference.

Please submit proposals including:

• Title

• Abstract (150–200 words)

• Name, contact details, and institutional affiliation

to: conference@ailasa.org
by: CoB Monday 17 August 2026

​

Applicants will receive confirmation of acceptance within two weeks of the final submission date. If you require early confirmation for funding purposes, please indicate this in your email.

​

Invited Keynotes and Speakers

Yásnaya Elena A. Gil is from Ayutla Mixe, Oaxaca. She is a linguist and writer, and a member of COLMIX, a collective dedicated to researching and promoting the Mixe language, history, and culture. She writes opinion columns and essays for publications including the newspaper El País and Gatopardo magazine. Her principal areas of interest are linguistic and poetic diversity, the rights of Indigenous peoples, and the imagination as a tool for responding to the climate emergency. She is the author of A We Without a State (Ona Ediciones) and Ää: Manifestos for Linguistic Diversity (Editorial Almadía), translated into English as This Mouth Is Mine by Charco Press.

​

​Sara C. Motta is a proud Indigenous-Mestiza of Colombia Muysca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic lineages living, loving, resisting and re-existiendo on the unceded lands of the Worimi peoples, NSW, so called Australia. She is a mother, grandmother, curandera/medicine woman, popular educator and international award-winning poet and political philosopher who is currently A/Professor in Politics at the University of Newcastle. She is a prolific writer of texts as breath and survivance and has co-created numerous projects of decolonising/indigenist feminist queering education as healing sovereignties in Abya Yala, UK and so-called Australia.  In all her praxis she is committed to amplifying, nurturing and honouring the pluriverse voices, epistemologies, methodologies, analytics and cosmologies of subjects, communities and territories who have been relegated to the flesh in theory and practise and to centre their/our world-making magic and philosophical-strategic brilliance.

​

Conference Organisers

Vek Lewis, Macarena Ortiz Jiménez, Luis F. Angosto Ferrández and Beatriz Carbajal, SLAS, University of Sydney​