Call for papers: Cities and Citizenship in Contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean

The Netherlands Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (NALACS), in cooperation with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, is pleased to announce the joint conference, ‘Cities and Citizenship in Contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean,’ which will be held on 16-17 June 2016 in Delft, the Netherlands.

The 2-day conference will embrace a wide range of topics related to urban development and citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean. In their pioneering collection of essays Cities and Citizenship, Holston and Appadurai (1999) as well as other prominent scholars stressed the importance of cities in the making of modern citizens. At the end of the twentieth century, they demonstrated that urban environments are salient sites for examining the renegotiations of citizenship, democracy, and national belonging. This is arguably particularly the case in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean, where cities seem to embody the aspirations of citizens and to showcase the best and the worse of their respective societies. It is here that we can observe major opportunities and threats to development, security and human rights, as well as major struggles for rights, inclusion and democracy