Wednesday, March 26 – Friday, March 28, 2025
The University of Texas at Austin
This conference is free and open to the public; no registration necessary
Wednesday, March 26 | 4:00–7:00 PM
School of Architecture
4:00 – 5:45 PM | Welcome and Opening Keynote
School of Architecture, 3rd floor lecture hall
Opening Remarks – Adela Pineda Franco, Director, LLILAS
Welcome – Heather Woofter, Dean, School of Architecture
Organizers’ Remarks – Juana Salcedo and Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez
Keynote Address: “Endless Journey for an Equitable City” – Alejandro Echeverri, Director/Co-founder, URBAM Center for Urban and Environmental Studies, Universidad EAFIT, Medellín; Distinguished Visiting Professor in Urbanism, TEC Monterrey (read abstract)
5:45 – 7:00 PM | Opening Reception and Exhibition
Jaguar Lens: Weaving Multispecies Landscapes across the Americas
Mebane Gallery (GOL 2.105) and Courtyard
Thursday, March 27 | 9:30 AM–5:30 PM
Eastwoods Room (UNB 2.102) Texas Union
Session I – Political Ecologies and Environmental Histories
9:30–11:30 AM
This session will offer ways to move beyond the traditional confines of the city, to inquire about the extensive geographies of the urban, along with its infrastructures, environments, and political ecologies.
Seth Denizen, Washington University in Louis
Wastewater Urbanism in the Mexican Altiplano (read abstract)
Felipe Correa, Somatic Collaborative, New York, NY
Building Roads to Take the Land (read abstract)
Marixa Lasso, Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales, Panama
Landscapes and the Erasure of History: The Example of the Panama Canal (read abstract)
Chair: Cristina Soriano, UT Austin
11:30 AM–12:30 PM | Light Lunch
Session II – Infrastructures and Nature Flows
12:30–3:00 PM
This panel will examine how nature flows, infrastructures, and technologies affect the urban experience, reshaping how people inhabit space and interact with each other.
C.J. Alvarez, UT Austin
Environmental Amnesia and the Rio Grande (read abstract)
Dean Chahim, New York University
Subsiding Dreams: Mexico City’s Sewers after the Implosion of Modernism (read abstract)
Zannah Matson, University of Colorado, Boulder
Respirar el Aire de Nuevos Horizontes: Infrastructure and Peripheral Integration in 20th-Century Colombia (read abstract)
Hannah Meszaros Martin, University of Southern California / Plano Negativo
La Tierra Proscrita / The Outlawed Earth (read abstract)
Chair: Lina Del Castillo, UT Austin
Coffee Break
Session III – Roundtable: Storytelling and Methods
3:30–5:30 PM
The participants in this roundtable will discuss how they have used non-conventional research methods, narratives, and media throughout their trajectories and how they envision using them in the future. It will be a central part of the conference, as it will illustrate how novel approaches offer new research and narrative strategies to expand our understanding of the urban experience.
Javier Auyero, UT Austin
Relatos Reales from the Urban Margins (read abstract)
Barbara E. Mundy, Tulane University
Lyin’, Cheatin’, Dream Chasin’: The City View (read abstract)
Lorraine Leu, UT Austin
Theorizing Black World-Making in Brazil and the Diaspora (read abstract)
Hannah Meszaros Martin, University of Southern California and Plano Negativo
Plano Negativo: New Investigative Aesthetics in Latin America (read abstract)
Carlos Andrés Baquero-Díaz, TERRA, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University
Crossing the River: Storytelling, Sciences, and the More-Than-Human World (read abstract)
Chair: Bjørn Sletto, UT Austin
Friday, March 28 | 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Eastwoods Room (UNB 2.102) Texas Union
Session IV – Recentering Human and More-Than-Human Lives
9:30–11:30 AM
This session will present specific case studies that center the lives of marginalized beings and neglected aspects of urban life.
Ana María Durán Calisto, Yale University
From Marginal to Central: Lessons from Historical Ecology and Archaeology (read abstract)
Guadalupe García, University of California, San Diego; Havana
The Two Franciscos: New World Ecologies and the Fracturing of Trans Imperial Geographies (read abstract)
Alex Hidalgo, Texas Christian University
Acoustic Cartographies of Urban Power (read abstract)
Hannah Meszaros Martin, University of Southern California
Expanding the Social World Downwards: Using Experimental Cartographies to Explore the Unseen World of Aquifers (read abstract)
Chair: Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, UT Austin
12:00 – 1:30 PM | Closing Keynote
Lunch served
Keynote Address: “Do Indigenous Ecologies Matter?” – Barbara E. Mundy, Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art, Tulane University (read abstract)