Inventing the Near Future:
Knowledge, Memory, and Imagination in Latin America
ILASSA Conference Program Here!
The 44th ILASSA Conference invites scholars, artists, activists, and community organizers to reflect on how Latin America imagines and constructs its near futures amid intensifying political, ecological, and epistemic transformations. Under the theme Inventing the Near Future: Knowledge, Memory, and Imagination in Latin America, this conference foregrounds the dynamic interplay between historical memory, situated knowledges, and speculative imaginaries as generative forces shaping contemporary struggles and possibilities across the region and its diasporas.
At a moment marked by democratic erosion, extractivist expansion, climate crisis, forced migration, and technological acceleration, the “near future” emerges not as a distant abstraction but as an arena of contestation. Who has the authority to define what is possible? Which pasts are mobilized to legitimize or resist political projects? How do Indigenous, Afro-descendant, feminist, queer, and migrant communities produce alternative epistemologies and prefigurative practices that challenge hegemonic temporalities? We seek contributions that examine how archives, oral histories, artistic practices, social movements, digital cultures, and everyday forms of resistance rework memory into futurity.
This conference welcomes interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities, social sciences, arts, and community-based research. We are particularly interested in work that explores decolonial thought, environmental justice, popular mobilization, diasporic belonging, speculative fiction, grassroots pedagogy, and collective memory as sites where knowledge production becomes a form of world-making. By centering Latin America as a space of epistemic innovation and political imagination, the 44th ILASSA Conference aims to foster dialogue on how near futures are not merely predicted—but actively invented.
About the Conference:
The in-person event will be held at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS)
2300 Red River St, Austin, Texas
Friday, March 27 and Saturday, March 28, 2026
The online event will be held on the Zoom Platform
Rooms and links will be provided in the week of the conference
This is a free event from the LLILAS Graduate students to Latin Americanists students from all Abya Yala.
This year we are happy to announce Dr. Maria Rosa Olivera – Williams as Keynote Speaker.
Maria Rosa Olivera – Williams is a professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She received a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in Modern and Contemporary Iberian and Latin American Literatures, for which she received the Presidential Award and Fellowship. Olivera-Williams teaches courses on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and culture; women’s literature and feminisms in Latin America; memory studies with a focus on militant movements, dictatorships, and transitions to democracy in the Southern Cone; and popular culture, music, dance and film. Olivera-Williams is the author of El arte de crear lo femenino: ficción, género e historia del Cono Sur (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2012; 2013), a theoretical and applied study of women’s social movements and fiction narratives during the second half of the twentieth century in the Southern Cone countries of Latin America, focusing on the post-suffragist period and the military dictatorship and post-dictatorship period. This book has been hailed as a “ground-breaking study of feminine identity through an original and in-depth analysis of the work of seven foundational authors of the Southern Cone, as well as a major contribution to the study of twentieth century Argentine, Chilean, and Uruguayan literature, culture, and history.”