Tenth Chicago Graduate Conference in Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latinx Studies
April 30 - May 2, 2026
9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Location
UH 1750 and 1501
Calendar
Download iCal FileA full schedule of events to come. More information can be found at:https://gradchicagoconference.wordpress.com/
The Tenth Chicago Graduate Conference in Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latinx Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals exploring The Inhumanities as a shared space for research, creation, and resistance. Co-hosted by the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, and the Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago, the conference aims at bringing together works from cultural, literary, artistic, philosophic studies that stand in conversation with themes of colonialism, racialization, gender and sexual dissidence, extractivism and experimental creation, among others. We welcome all to think about how The Inhumanities can articulate these diverse fields of study in a common reflection about the contemporary conditions of knowledge production, materiality, and life.
Today’s catastrophic times place the category of “the Humanities” in a thorny position. On the one side, the institutional dismantling of the Humanities, evidenced by funding cuts and closure of programs, as a symptom of political and epistemic crises. On the other side, the unacceptable defense of the “Human” as Man (Wynter)—European, white, land-owning, secular—ntenable in our contemporary times. The structural disregard of the Humanities is synced with the precarity of those lives who have been “inhumanized”, dispossessed of political subjectivity and reduced to the conditions of objects. What emerges, then, is the need for a lexicon capable of naming the two crises—the institutional and the conceptual.
It is within this context that the framework of The Inhumanities becomes crucial, as it shows how these two dimensions are interconnected: modern Humanities have always grounded themselves in the exclusion of the inhuman, and their current crumbling exposes that constitutive wound. The Inhumanities (Yusoff) introduce an analytical framework that makes visible the double historical life of the inhuman as matter and as racial category, which constitutes liberal Humanism and its institutions. Thinking from the standpoint of The Inhumanities opens a transversal terrain that sees the struggle for racial and gender equality, extractivism, and colonialism as intersectional paradigms of the present; where the connections between genocide and ecocide, matter and subjectivity, and land and politics emerge as historical conditions of Humanism, and, at the same time, as fissures through which to find other ways of thinking and inhabiting.
Date posted
Feb 17, 2026
Date updated
Feb 17, 2026