Margins in Latin American Studies | Graduate Conference

Margins in Latin American Studies 

Graduate Conference

Monday 17 June - Tuesday 18 June 2024

In person and Online

TORCH Radcliffe Humanities Building and Trinity College

Registration is now open and free for all interested students and researchers. If you are interested in participating in our satellite activities, please register here.

The Graduate Conference will also be broadcast on Zoom. Please register to receive the link.

The Oxford Latin American Graduate Network is proud to present our graduate conference, Margins in Latin American Studies, with the generous support of TORCH’s Critical Thinking Communities Fund, the Latin American Centre, Magdalen College, and Trinity College.

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body”, writes bell hooks, describing it as a “site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (1995). Margins usually represent a border, the outline of a figure, but at the same time they can be found in the interstices, as third spaces (Bhabha, 2002), entrelugares (Santiago, 2000) or liminal zones – conflicting as well as productive – in which strict binaries yield their specificity or concepts such as unity and purity lose their hegemonic weight. Margins can be imaginary sometimes, others they can be terribly real; they may appear symbolically, or in the form of extreme violence, when the very existence of the limit overflows the boundaries in which it was contained. This Conference aims to examine the concept of Margins in contemporary Latin American Studies, from moving thresholds to hybrid frontiers, which are no longer barriers but passages where diverse traditions may converge.

Margins are shifting constantly, from territories being transformed by extractivism or urban expansion, to innovative ways of thinking and visualizing the limits of our imagination and existence through technology. On the one hand, this Conference seeks to explore this moving landscape in Latin America, charting it through the confluence of perspectives and approaches of graduate students from different universities, disciplines, and backgrounds. On the other hand, we aim to discuss possible resignifications of margins in and from Latin American studies, addressing it not so much as a locus of domestication, but as a space of friction, productive conflict, contamination, questioning, and possibilities.

We will approach this concept from a variety of angles and disciplines through, but not limited to, the social sciences, arts and humanities, considering problems such as centre/periphery relations, issues of marginality and dispossession, and cultural and political standpoints. We see these problems not only as unidirectional theoretical or artistic translations and reappropriations, but also as cannibalized, disfigured and transmuted strategies. We welcome different approaches in terms of positionality or intersectionality, as well as methodological or epistemic concerns. The proposals are encouraged—although not exclusively—to consider their contributions in relation to these four interconnected problems:

·     Inhabiting the margins: politics and mobility

·     Thinking inside and outside the margins: epistemics and theories

·     Side notes: methodologies and practices

·     Drawing the margins: issues of representation

Conference programme:

Please find full programme here. 

With special thanks to our keynote speakers, Professor María del Pilar Blanco (University of Oxford) and Professor Simón Escoffier (Universidad Católica de Chile).

Alongside the conference panels, there will also be a series of satellite activities on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday:

• Monday 17 June, 6:00PM - 7:00PM - movement workshop with Lu Greco
• Tuesday 18 June, 6:30PM - 9:00PM - movie screening and Q&A
• Wednesday 19 June, morning - a tour of the Latin American Centre, a visit to the PhotoVoice Exhibition (School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography), a walk through Port Meadow

In keeping with our focus on margins and marginality, these are creative-critical activities that will encourage us to think and reflect on the ideas that emerge through the panels and other academic discussion. All are welcome but we ask you to register below to help us with planning.

Full details regarding all conference events will be communicated with registered attendees.

Conference office

Email: olagnconference2024@gmail.com 

Website: https://www.lac.ox.ac.uk/lac-dphil-network / https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/oxford-latin-american-graduate-network 

The Oxford Latin American Graduate Network (OLAGN) is part of TORCH Student Networks