Mark your calendars and join us on April 27 & 28 for the XXI Lusophone and Hispanic Conference.

This year's conference proposes a debate on fostering a more inclusive and diverse academia. We hope to foster a safe space and interdisciplinary discussion around the university and its practices.

The keynote speaker is Professor Jaime Alves from the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. The title of his presentation is "Political Orphanage: Toward a deconstruction of ‘Latin America’ and its antiblack social geographies".

Professor Alves holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to UC Santa Barbara, he taught Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Politics at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York and was a visiting professor in the Center for African Diaspora Studies at Universidad Icesi, in Colombia. He is the author of The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Professor Alves' current research focuses on the geographies of policing and black spatial insurgency in the urban margins of two Latin American cities. More specifically, he is interested in making ethnographically visible how black life is sustained and lived in the intersections of infrastructural violence, racialized policing practices, and broad urban security dynamics in Santiago de Cali (Colombia) and São Paulo (Brazil).

This conference is co-sponsored by the Center for Portuguese Studies, the Comparative Literature Program, the Department of Black Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Graduate Student Association, the Graduate Division, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program.