Program Tracks and Committee Members

We are witnessing the gradual unraveling of the global order that has taken shape since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is an ongoing process marked by a high degree of uncertainty and indeterminacy. However, it is possible to identify some broad yet relevant elements for Latin America and the Caribbean: the erosion of international law by major economic and military powers (the United States, Russia, and Israel); the diversification and transformation of economic, financial, and trade networks; the emergence of new political and economic actors and blocs expanding their presence in the region; the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China; and the resurgence of neo-imperialism.

As China emerges as a rising power, the United States—until just a few decades ago the hegemonic power—shows signs of relative decline. Global reordering is unfolding across productive, financial, technological, and military dimensions. Without pursuing direct military expansion beyond its immediate neighborhood or exporting its political model, China has consolidated its position as the world's second-largest economy, a key trading partner in South America, and a central actor in the BRICS, promoting South-South cooperation, strategic infrastructure, the energy transition, and control over critical minerals that are abundant in the region. By contrast, the United States has strengthened its military presence and intensified its search for strategic resources while confronting the weakening of the dollar's dominance and deepening securitization policies.

For the first time since the post-World War II era, this scenario includes other decisive actors playing a key role in the reconfiguration of this historical transition. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the so-called BRICS+ countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia), and other countries of similar weight (such as Mexico and Colombia) hold the potential to consolidate more plural alternatives to the bipolarity of the Cold War or to the weak multilateralism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Latin America occupies a pivotal position between the Atlantic and Pacific, as well as between the Global North and the Global South. In this context of change, national and regional political projects—and their relationship with new centers of global decision-making—remain to be defined.

What kind of regional political project will emerge in response to these disputes? Will a more autonomous and diversified form of international integration take shape, or will new forms of dependency become entrenched? What implications will this have for democracy, development, and sovereignty in the region?

Aldo Panfichi Huamán, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Ernesto Isunza Vera, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social-Golfo 

This track examines the evolving and increasingly complex relationship between the state and society in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a particular focus on how practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of care are being reshaped under conditions of profound political, economic, and social transformation.

The track seeks to advance conceptual approaches to the state and to theories of state–society interaction by placing care at the center of the analysis. By examining how care is organized, displaced, instrumentalized, or collectively reimagined, it seeks to shed light on shifting boundaries between protection and abandonment, governance and intimacy, and responsibility and survival in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean.

The topics covered will include processes of state weakening or hollowing out, necropolitics, criminal governance, and moments of state collapse and transformation. In doing so, it will explore how these dynamics reshape not only authority and coercion, but also the distribution, withdrawal, or delegation of care. It will also address how care is produced, governed, and contested in contexts where the state’s capacity to ensure welfare and security is uneven, fragmented, or actively undermined.

At the same time, the track will examine the diverse and emerging forms of interaction between state and society, analyzing both regulatory and law enforcement functions as well as the state’s role in providing public goods, welfare programs, and care infrastructures. Special attention will be paid to the growing role of non-state actors—communities, families, criminal organizations, NGOs, and social movements—in filling care gaps left by state retrenchment, as well as to the moral, political, and affective consequences of these arrangements.

Contributions may address, among others, the following questions: Who is expected to provide care when the state withdraws or governs through violence? Which lives are deemed worthy of care, and which are left exposed to abandonment or necropolitical forms of governance? How do informal or illicit forms of governance provide protection or welfare, and at what social cost?

Rossana Castiglioni, Universidad Diego Portales
José Miguel Cruz, Florida International University
Maria Cecilia Rossel, Universidad Católica de Uruguay

Over the past decade, Latin America and the Caribbean have become sites of profound contestation over democracy, its institutions, and its meanings. The rise of the radical right in some countries and the authoritarian tendencies of the left-wing in others have led to setbacks in the social policies and rights that characterized the previous cycle of democratic expansion. These processes have been driven and intensified by the ambivalent role of digital technologies and platforms, as well as by the emergence of far-right, conservative, religious, and anti-rights actors and organizations that have reshaped forms of mobilization, control, and information, redefining the boundaries between participation, institutionalization, and conflict.

Yet these adverse contexts have not simply marked the end of democratic construction. On the contrary, they have given rise to new forms of collective action that emerge both as strategies of resistance to autocratization and as political innovations and emancipatory practices that introduce new repertoires, languages, and horizons of participation, representation, and accountability. These experiences display resilience, adaptation, and normative ambiguity, offering insights into how democratic collapse is being navigated, confronted, and reproduced. At the same time, the boundaries between participation and institutionalization, democracy and reaction, innovation and capture, and the commons and the individual have become increasingly blurred.

This track proposes analyzing democracy as a field of contestation rather than as a given normative horizon. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions that examine both conservative and anti-rights activism as well as progressive and democratic forms of mobilization. We also welcome contributions that explore the tensions between democratic backsliding, resistance, and (non-)democratic innovation in Latin America and the Caribbean, including but not limited to the following questions:

• How are representation and participation being reconfigured in contexts of polarization and autocratization?
• In what ways are participatory mechanisms, digital platforms, and repertoires of collective action appropriated or hollowed out by authoritarian/exclusionary or democratic/inclusive actors?
• What forms of resilience and adaptation do democratic innovations, and activist movements exhibit in the face of institutional erosion?
• How can these dynamics be compared across arenas (national/subnational), countries, and different regime types?

We invite in-depth case studies, comparative analyses, ethnographic research, and theoretical contributions with the aim of fostering a space for critical dialogue on who defines democracy today in Latin America and the Caribbean, how it is contested, and how it is being reconfigured.

Rebecca Abers, Universidade de Brasília
Karina Bárcenas Barajas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

This track explores how information technologies—spanning the last three decades and extending to the current rise of generative AI—are reshaping knowledge production, fostering new transdisciplinary pedagogies, and enabling emerging cultural and aesthetic practices across fields such as visual arts, writing, music, and performance.

In a context marked by polycrisis, we invite papers that examine how knowledge production and aesthetic practices are opening up and reframing debates on topics such as new materialisms, archival desire, pedagogy, transdisciplinary approaches, posthumanism, and digital culture. We are particularly interested in how urgent forms of knowledge production, alongside images and narratives intersect with posthumanist thought, which “dares to challenge ontological mystifications, social distortions, scientific reductionisms, and disenchantments about the world that have been constructed and reproduced through historical and bio-cultural processes of naturalizing the human” (Francesca Ferrando 2023).

What kinds of horizons—both promising and unsettling—are being opened by the rapid expansion of generative AI in relation to knowledge production, teaching, and dissemination? In what ways is this technological shift intertwined with broader aesthetic and pedagogical dimensions of our shared life? And in what ways are ideas of the subject, knowledge, and politics being reshaped through these changes? Finally, what impact might these changes have on the reconfiguration of an ecology of knowledge?

Mónica Benitez, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Lerma
Azucena Castro, Rice University
Mauricio Dussauge-Laguna, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-México