[null, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/1._Front_Karwita-half_irrigated_farmer-ds2014.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/1._Front_Karwita-half_irrigated_farmer-ds2014.jpg", "alt_text": "Agriculture in the Anthropocene"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Research_Institute_of_Robotics4.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Research_Institute_of_Robotics4.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Research Institute of Robotics", "alt_text": "The Afterlives of Cybernetics: Tracing the Information Revolution from the 1960s to Big Data"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Train_station_in_Lviv_Ukraine_crop.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Train_station_in_Lviv_Ukraine_crop.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Train station in Lviv Ukraine crop", "alt_text": "Ukraine and the Challenges of International Law: Annexation, Aggression, Cyber Warfare"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Maccari-Cicero2.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Maccari-Cicero2.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Maccari Cicero", "alt_text": "Elites and Democracy in Modern Political Thought"}, null, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Cultured_Rat_Hippocampal_Neuron_%2824327909026%29.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Cultured_Rat_Hippocampal_Neuron_%2824327909026%29.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Cultured Rat Hippocampal Neuron", "alt_text": "Predictive Processing: Reconstructing the Mind?"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Lagarde.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Lagarde.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Lagarde", "alt_text": "Transformations in Global Economic Governance"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/ecosystems.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/ecosystems.jpg", "formatted_filename": "ecosystems", "alt_text": "New Accounting for the Management of Ecosystems"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Holy_Mosque_of_Makkah.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Holy_Mosque_of_Makkah.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Holy Mosque of Makkah", "alt_text": "Shari\u2019a in Motion: Islam, Law and Mobility"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Kreuz_im_Gebirge.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Kreuz_im_Gebirge.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Caspar David Friedrich Das Kreuz im Gebirge", "alt_text": "Theology and Politics in the German Imagination, 1789\u20131848"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Measuring_Matters.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Measuring_Matters.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Measuring Matters", "alt_text": "Measuring Matters: Histories of Assessing Inequality"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2072/", "unformatted_src": "/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Peas.jpg", "src": "https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/assets/event_posters/_thumb/Peas.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Peas", "alt_text": "Reproducing the Environment"}, null]
Latin American Utopian Visions: A Critical Look for the 21st Century

19 April 2013 - 20 April 2013


Sandra Brunnegger (Department of Social Anthropology / St Edmund's College)

Karen Ann Faulk (Carnegie Mellon University)

Conference Summary

This conference seeks to bring together recent scholarship on how utopian visions have shaped Latin America throughout its history.  Uniting work from across and between disciplinary boundaries, the conference looks to explore the history, construction, contexts, and effects of imagined utopias, as well as, and crucially, the interrelations between them.  From its inception as an ideologically constituted unit born of the colonial encounter, Latin America has been a subject and producer of idealized imaginaries of universal order and humanity’s place within it.  Its relegation to Europe’s ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 2003) and the projections of European escapist fantasies onto its terrain was a fundamental determinant of colonial policy for several hundred years.  In exploring a range of utopian visions, from the lasting allure of communist revolution to the idealist programs that directed modernism’s drive to develop, this conference explores the multifarious ways in which Latin America has served as the landscape upon which utopian ideas have been imagined, designed, and attempted.  Furthermore, in bringing together a diverse set of scholarship, the conference aims to excavate the complex entanglements and overlaps between seemingly contradictory but inherently intertwined elements of different utopias.  Fundamentally, the conference seeks to serve as a forum for productive discussion and debate of the nature and potential in contemporary utopian visions, or in what Fernando Coronil has described as “the present-day future imaginary” (2010). Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) and the Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS), University of Cambridge.

Accommodation for non-paper giving delegates

Visit Cambridge
Cambridge Rooms
University of Cambridge accommodation webpage

Administrative assistance: email@example.com

Latin American Visions Programme

Location : CRASSH, Alison Richards building - SG1&2

Date : 18-20 April 2013 27 October 2017

Agriculture in the Anthropocene 17 November 2017 4 December 2017 7 December 2017

Elites and Democracy in Modern Political Thought 14 December 2017

Poetics Before Modernity Conference 2017 11 January 2018

Predictive Processing: Reconstructing the Mind? 
Transformations in Global Economic Governance 6 September 2017

New Accounting for the Management of Ecosystems 14 July 2017

Shari’a in Motion: Islam, Law and Mobility 10 July 2017

Theology and Politics in the German Imagination, 1789–1848 
Measuring Matters: Histories of Assessing Inequality 29 June 2017

Reproducing the Environment