LatCrit/SALT Faculty Development Workshop: October 7, 2021
Biennial LatCrit Conference: October 8–9, 2021
University of Denver Sturm College of Law
Resistance and Transformation:
Mapping Critical Geographies and Alternative Possibilities
in Legal Scholarship and Praxis for the Next Twenty-Five Years
LatCrit 2021 celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory. After a quarter century, LatCrit—as an organization, movement, and community—has mapped critical geographies to challenge the regnant hierarchies that define the practice, teaching, and theory of law and legal institutions. Inheriting and expanding antecedent and concurrent projects like legal realism, critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, indigenous legal theory, queer legal theory, and critical disability law, LatCrit has established itself as a force within the legal academy and related activist circles in the United States and beyond.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to exacerbate and crystallize the suffering caused by five cosynthetic, existential, and longstanding epidemics. Peoples across the world are reckoning with the inability of law, government, society, institutions, organizations, families, and individuals to cope with what may seem like multiple simultaneous crises, but which LatCrit theory, praxis, and community instead discern as the toxic fruit of these five cosynthetic, existential, and longstanding epidemics.
First, the epidemic of sexism, racism, settler colonialism, ableism, nationalism, cisnormativity, and straight supremacy continues to undermine the dignity of individuals and shape their life chances. Second, the epidemic of economic inequities continues to redistribute the spoils of capitalist economic “opportunity” to the “One Percent.” Third, the epidemic of sociolegal determinants continues to utilize inequality itself as a mechanism to further distribute benefits and burdens unequally, creating vicious cycles of unequal and inadequate education, health, and wellbeing. Fourth, the epidemic of destructive environmental changes wrought by the “Great Acceleration” of industrial and postindustrial pollution continues to impinge upon peoples in the Global South. And finally, the epidemic of coloniality—from the obviously extractive and exploitive capitalism of plantations, colonies, and empires, to the (somewhat) less obvious persistence of neo-imperialist economic frameworks, continues to exacerbate the intentionally-created national disparities and vast inequities between rich and poor nations.
Amidst this situation, how should people who affiliate with LatCrit, and related movements of critical, antisubordinationist, and progressive scholars, teachers, lawyers, law students, and other activists, attempt to move forward? Should we devote our energy to organizing for incremental reform, attempting to work within existing frameworks and power structures? Or is it time to resist the impulse for incrementalistic reform, and instead organize and agitate vigorously for transformative action? Or should we instead take some time to rest and regroup in order to live and fight another day? Or can we do all three while remaining a critical movement?
If we do not answer these urgent questions now, the forces of reaction, redemption, regression, and retrenchment will do so for us. Join us—virtually—in Denver for this forward-looking, action-focused, cross-disciplinary exchange. Share your vision for how we might secure a postsubordination future in which we and our descendants can breathe freely together under a blue sky.
The LatCrit board of directors invites presentations and other forms of participation on these topics and others. We welcome Panel, Roundtable, and Workshop proposals, as well as individual papers and works in progress, on topics related to the conference themes and other aspects of critical outsider jurisprudence.
Please submit an abstract of your proposal, and your contact information, by June 15, 2021 at https://latcrit.org/submit-your-paper/. For general information and questions about the conference, please email Prof. Saru Matambanadzo at smatamba@tulane.edu.
