Call for Papers: Questioning Spaces of Citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean

Questioning Spaces of Citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean

Latin American History Graduate Student Conference

Columbia University, New York, NY

April 11-12, 2014

Scholars often invoke citizenship as an analytic frame to understand the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. While the concept can encompass a broad range of topics, this conference will focus on the spaces where individuals and groups come into contact with the institutions and symbols of the state. These spaces may be physical places, institutional settings, discursive realms, or other fora.  In this graduate student conference, we will ask how such spaces of citizenship are constructed, delimited, and at times rejected, and how the terms of interaction and negotiation in these spaces are defined and re-defined. As historians, we can productively question the boundaries of these spaces, but we should also analyze the ways in which historical subjects themselves have contested citizenship. We will examine the history of how people have demanded rights and made claims to belonging. In addition, we will look at the moments when individuals or groups have been excluded from citizenship, and when citizens and non-citizens have created alternative venues to mobilize and define their identity beyond the reach of Latin American nation-states.

This conference will explore the dynamic, contingent, dialogic, and discursive nature of the state. Therefore, participants are encouraged to reflect from an interdisciplinary perspective on the meaning of citizenship and to problematize the notion of the state, moving away from a static or unified understanding of what the state “is.” We will draw attention to the material reality of the state: the places it controls, the resources it commands, the physical power it wields, and the social actors who serve as state agents. We will also explore whether we can speak of a uniquely Latin American form or practice of citizenship that usefully illuminates the continent’s history. Moving away from abstract or normative models, these lines of inquiry support multiple, contextualized notions of citizenship.

Conference topics include, but are not limited to:

• Space, individuals, and the state

• Race, ethnicity, and class

• Definitions and languages of citizenship

• Precursors and alternatives to citizenship

• Membership and belonging

• Gender and citizenship

• Generation, age, and citizenship

• Institutions and citizenship

• Extraterritorial citizenship

• Anti-state and anti-nationalist discourses

Our website contains more information on possible topics.

We welcome submissions on both the colonial and national periods. Participants from other disciplines who incorporate a historical perspective are invited to submit abstracts as well. Papers can focus on any part of Latin America and the Caribbean, and we also encourage submissions from those with transnational and international projects that touch on the Americas.

Submissions will be processed using an online form available on our website, http://2014citizenshipconference.wordpress.com. Abstracts should be limited to 250 words. We will accept submissions until December 1, 2013. We will notify acceptances by December 20, 2013. Accepted participants should submit a final version of their papers by March 7, 2014. Further details, and updated information as it becomes available, will be posted on our website.

Please contact the organizers with any questions at 2014CitizenshipConference@gmail.com.