Deadline: August 25, 2025
Contact: Niall Peach, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of Cincinnati
Email: peachna@ucmail.uc.edu
Phone: 7656373464
Latin American Studies Association 2026
CFP for Panel on Technologies of Utopia/Dystopia
May 26-30, 2026 in person (Paris, France)
https://lasaweb.org/es/lasa2026/
From the utopia of a “discovered” America of rivers glittering with silver to the infernal jungles that evoked the dystopic operations of the plantation, the aesthetic oscillation between these two scapes often has acted as motor and mirror for various colonial and neo-colonial technologies that proscribed uneven (and at times impossible) development. Scholars such as Katherine McKittrick, Yilver Mosquera-Vallejo and Ulrich Oslender, and Macarena Gómez Barris have indexed such scapes as producers of “unimaginable,” “terror,” and “extractivist” geographies, evidencing the vivid afterlives of proscriptive developmental technologies deployed within the regulatory systems of the Latin American Republic. By addressing the utopic and dystopic, this panel seeks to redress how the Global South’s relationship with technology writ large has created a vexed portrayal of the region, which extends from economic “dependency theory” to the continued biopolitical regulation of life under a “cruel modernity.” Building upon the 2026 LASA Congress’s theme of “Republic and Revolution,” then, this panel examines how Latinx and Latin American authors and other cultural workers have examined the revolutionary potential of technological innovations in both utopic and dystopic imaginaries.
As producers of material and ideological microcosmic geographies, utopias and dystopias serve as critiques of society, exploring power and control; how it is gained, maintained, undermined, etc. In their speculative capacities they also ultimately question the definition and essential characteristics of a “good” society. What is more, when brought into union with each other and held in tension, the relationality of the utopia to dystopia brings into relief the potential of their friction and the underlying technologies deployed in their creation. This panel seeks to explore how the interaction of technology and the material not only facilitates access to utopic and dystopic places but is in itself a utopic and dystopic technology. In this way, it is our aim to engage broadly with various technologies that have emerged from utopia and dystopia as material and imagined sites: thinking with shifts in environment, travel, communication, the technologies of race, borders, and border management, and so on.
We welcome papers focusing on the intersection of technology and utopia/dystopia from any time period or location in Latin America, including Latinx communities and migrant communities. Please send a brief abstract (250 words or less) and 1-page CV to the panel co-organizers: Niall Peach (peachna@ucmail.uc.edu) and Cara Kinnally (ckinnall@purdue.edu) by August 25, 2025 for consideration as a panelist.
Posted on August 25, 2025
