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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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: Saturday 1 August 2026

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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.

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Invited Keynotes and Speakers

Keynotes TBC

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Conference Organisers

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

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Keynote Bio-notes

TBC