NALACS Conference ‘Cities and Citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean’

The Netherlands Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (NALACS), in cooperation with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, is pleased to announce the joint conference, ‘Cities and Citizenship in Contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean,’ which will be held on 16-17 June 2016 in Delft, the Netherlands.

The 2-day conference will embrace a wide range of topics related to urban development and citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean. In their pioneering collection of essays Cities and Citizenship, Holston and Appadurai (1999) as well as other prominent scholars stressed the importance of cities in the making of modern citizens. At the end of the twentieth century, they demonstrated that urban environments are salient sites for examining the renegotiations of citizenship, democracy, and national belonging. This is arguably particularly the case in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean, where cities seem to embody the aspirations of citizens and to showcase the best and the worse of their respective societies. It is here that we can observe major opportunities and threats to development, security and human rights, as well as major struggles for rights, inclusion and democracy

For this conference, we invite individual papers as well as panels proposals that look at the relationship between urban development and practices of citizenship. Conference panels will be organized along four tracks:

Track 1. Cities and Violence
Cities as salient sites where violence and conflict develop and affect the lives of citizens.

Track 2. Cities and sustainable development
Cities as salient sites where (spatial) planning and (sustainable) development ideas are applied, and where grassroots and governments alternatingly clash or collaborate in order to simultaneously build cities and structures of citizenship.

Track 3. Cities and identity
Cities as salient sites where citizen’s identities and resistances are expressed and repressed.

Track 4. Open for suggestions
Cities as salient sites for other themes related to urban life and urban development.

General Conference Information

Venue: The conference will be held at: Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL Delft, The Netherlands

Registration fee:
Non-members: € 85 including drinks, Thursday night dinner & film, Friday lunch
Regular NALACS members: € 55 including drinks, Thursday night dinner & film, Friday lunch
NALACS-OLA members: € 25 including drinks and film, excluding lunch and dinner
Master students: € 25 including drinks and film, excluding lunch and dinner

Sessions: Each track will have three time slots of two hours, organized as parallel sessions. Each panel can accommodate up to five presenters. If a panel proposal is accepted, the panel coordinator will be responsible for a timely registration of the participants and the delivery of papers.

For more information, please visit our official website www.nalacs.nl or conference page https://citiescitizenship.wordpress.com/.