Mini-Conference on Latin American and Latinx Political Thought

This mini-conference convenes scholars who work in the growing field of Latin American and Latinx Political Thought. Building on its successes in previous years, the 2025 mini-conference tackles questions of Latin American and Latinx Thought through a wide range of approaches that speak to different levels of analysis and distinct sites of inquiry: from state-centric approaches to fiction, from activism to double-edged processes. The first panel focuses on the role of the state and immigration law in shaping racial dynamics and the figure of the immigrant. In contrast, the second panel brings together scholars who examine fiction written by BIPOC writers to unearth the ways in which colonial discourses shape people’s imagined futures. The third panel brings together papers who discuss the underbelly of seemingly desirable processes. And the last panel gathers scholars of political activism. The program also includes a roundtable on the status of theoretically informed research on racial and ethnic politics. The goal of the program as a whole is to encourage interdisciplinary conversation on political theory research which attends to the political innovations of Latin American and Latinx contexts.