Conference 2019
LAIS Undergraduate Student Conference 2019
APRIL 10-11, 2019 | Santa Barbara Harbor Room, UCen, UC Santa Barbara
Displacements: Peoples, politics, and rights
Conference Summary
The displacement of peoples fleeing violence and extreme poverty in their home countries is one of the most pressing problems worldwide. Some telling examples are taking place in Latin America. According to the UN and Doctors Without Borders, an estimated 500,000 people flee Central America for Mexico and the US every year, and around 3 million people have left Venezuela since 2014. Every year, Spain and Portugal receive thousands of refugees from conflict-ravaged regions in Africa and the Middle East. This situation impacts local communities, national politics, and transnational relations, and has fostered political extremism, exploitation, and organized crime. Climate change will aggravate this problem in coming decades, as land and resources become scarcer.
This academic conference brought together undergraduate students from California for a discussion on Displacements: peoples, politics, and rights in Latin America and the Iberian World. Students from across the social and natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts presented papers that addressed the theme of displacements, broadly understood: the displacement of peoples, but also of cultures, objects, and ideas. The keynote was delivered by Dr. Terry Lynn Karl (Gildred Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies, Stanford University), Massacres, migrtion, and the promise of change.
Conference in the News
The LAIS Undergraduate Student Conference 2019 was featured in The Current. You can read the article HERE.
Conference Program
