LAIS Undergraduate Student Conference 2019

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 aims to bring together undergraduate students from California for a discussion on Displacements: peoples, politics, and rights in Latin America and the Iberian World. We welcome papers and presentations from different disciplines across the social and natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts that address the theme of displacements, broadly understood: the displacement of peoples, but also of cultures, objects, and ideas.