We construct sanctuary—refuge, protection, and safety—in times of trouble. Sanctuary may mean escape from political or religious persecution or protection from environmental disaster. It may be sacred or secular, underground or overtly revolutionary. It may be a physical space or part of our consciousness and dreams for the future, a state of being or promise of utopia. Sanctuary is often very real, but it is also artistic and poetic, taking shape with our imaginations. Sanctuary suggests that crisis will be overcome, the vulnerable protected, the newly dead guided to the beyond. However, it may also indicate that danger is imminent and that we risk everything by leaving its confines – be it spatial or ideological. Grave consequences sometimes occur if we cannot reach its borders or if its borders are breached from the outside. Certain conditions are crucial for successful refuge, including mercy, altruism, hospitality, empathy, and alliance.
Latin America and the Caribbean have long histories of sanctuary, santuario, or sanctuaire in religious, political, social, and environmental contexts. For centuries, dissidents have fled to alternative worlds or have stayed put to fight and built new ones. Inclusion and exclusion define cultural and national identities and communities, yet the boundaries they determine are continually disputed and in flux: Who is in, who is out? Who or what is legal and legitimate, illegal or illicit, sacred or profane? Who defines spaces of sanctuary and controls the bodies and minds flowing between them? Who would we take in and harbor in our own homes if asked? And how do fear and hope drive our actions?
The 2017 LASC student conference invites presentations that examine these questions and those related. We invite participants to explore elements of the theme through concepts, practices, and problems in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among Latin Americans and Latina/o/x living in the United States or anywhere else in the world. As a trans-disciplinary center, the Latin American Studies Center encourages proposals that cross-methodological and analytical boundaries. We ask participants to consider how the proposed paper, panel, or creative project might relate generally to the theme of sanctuary in order to generate a common conversation about the great variety of viewpoints that will be presented.
General topics that relate to theme (but not all): definitions of terms (sanctuary, refuge, asylum, etc.) in different contexts danger, precarity, risk, peril, dystopia imprisonment, sequestration flight, return, escape fantasy, alternative social realities, utopia artistic visions and poetic representations resistance, activism, revolution, social movements fixity, mobility, permanence, transience borders, boundaries, walls, fronteras oasis, shelter, wilderness environment, ecology law and social justice refuge formed through racial or ethnic communities displacement, immigration, emigration gender and sexual identity, queer communities definitions, development, or destruction of “safe spaces” feminism, postcolonial, subaltern class, economic oppression and transformation nation, nationalism, national identity religion, belief, spirituality, temple, church, mosque intellectual, academic, and/or personal freedom