The Conference

Decolonizing the Americas – Methods of Resistance is a multidisciplinary conference for graduate students, artists, activists, and independent practitioners working on research concerning Latin America and the Caribbean. Hosted by the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University, the conference will feature papers, workshops, performances and discussions, providing an unparalleled opportunity to engage with diverse contemporary aesthetic, scholarly, and transdisciplinary practices informed by decolonial methodologies. We are working with the Journal of Latin American Encounters to offer conference participants the opportunity to publish their presented work in a special issue of the journal to be published at a later date.

While overt colonization ended with the official independence  of the Americas during the nineteenth century and of much of the global south in the late twentieth century, contemporary imperialism and globalization perpetuate colonial inequities and structures of power, epistemology, and visuality. Decoloniality, as both a political and epistemic project, problematizes these histories and contemporary power structures. Decolonial methodologies are therefore ways of thinking and doing that present options for “confronting and delinking from […] the colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo 2011: xxvii).

Coming together to share their research, activist and creative practices, conference participants will explore and engage with transdisciplinary methodologies of resistance. We invite proposals from graduate students, artists, curators, activists, community organizers, and independent researchers whose work engages with decolonization, contemporary Indigenous thought, settler-colonial resistance, aesthetics, and any related fields from across the Americas and the Caribbean. In addition to the traditional formats of paper presentations and panel sessions, we also aim to integrate a wider program that includes artistic presentations, workshops, and roundtable discussions.

  • Mignolo WD (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
  • The image used for this website is a picture of a graffiti entitled Embera, painted by El Decertor in Bogota, Colombia. The image can be found here.