The 2010 Lozano Long Conference – The Challenges of Violence: Globalization, Criminality, and Terror in Contemporary Latin America

March 4–5, 2010
The University of Texas at Austin
Santa Rita Room, Texas Union 3.502

 

Violence has become the signal threat to stability in Latin America in the new millennium. Kidnappings and murders generate lurid headlines from Mexico to Honduras to Argentina. Communities tired of statelessness and voicelessness set suspected criminals on fire in Guatemalan public squares. Hundreds of women die violent deaths in Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala City while the state remains either impotent or indifferent. Police raids into Rio’s favelas kill dozens of people while drug trafficking gangs stockpile more numerous and more powerful weapons. Prison gangs paralyze the megalopolis of São Paulo for days in retaliation for official measures taken against their imprisoned leaders. Meanwhile, structural violence continues to condemn huge portions of the region’s population to poverty, disease, marginalization, and penury. If cold war ideologies set Latin America aflame in the 1960s and 1970s, a far more complex set of factors stokes the ordinary and extraordinary violence that burns in the region today.
 
In its Third Annual Lozano Long Conference, LLILAS will host the academics who are exploring the causes and consequences of this conflagration. Researchers have only begun to respond to these new challenges to democracy, development, and human well-being. The time is ripe for a conference that brings together cutting edge research from different disciplines, perspectives, methods, and viewpoints, all united around a concern for the peoples of the region and the circumstances they face.
 
The conference will host panels on topics such as gender violence; intimate violence; organized violence; the trafficking of humans, weapons, and drugs; political, state, and para-state violence; structural violence, including poverty, forced migration, racism, and discrimination; and the responses to violence, including representations of violence in the media, literature, films, and public discourse. The conference will follow a unique and, it is hoped, productive format. It will include a series of keynote panels of prominent academics on each cluster of issues. These panels will be followed by workshop-style breakout sessions chaired by the keynote speakers for those just beginning their research into these issues, in order to provide feedback and to exchange ideas. The workshop panels are open to paper proposals from researchers at all stages of their careers, from graduate students to senior scholars. The institute hopes in this way to foster and stimulate a new wave of theoretically informed, interdisciplinary, and culturally aware research into this crucial new challenge for Latin America.
 
Sponsored by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies.

For more information, please contact Paloma Diaz at 512.232.2409.