Latina/o Religion, Culture, and Society Unit

1. Title: “Afro-Latinidad and Accountable Futures: Leadership and Tradition in Service of Mañana.”

Description: Serious engagement with the "future" requires more than just a seat at a table that was narrowed by design and exclusionary by habit. It demands that we remain attentive to what we ask for, what we need, and how we might broaden that table ourselves. Authentic transformation cannot stay stuck in a presumed one-way dynamic between marginalized communities and dominant power structures. We must also confront how structures of domination are replicated within our own communities, often through unrecognized or unnamed cultural dynamics.

This session invites honest accountability in setting the conditions for more equitable futures. We seek to name the intercultural and intra-communal violence that shows up between us and within us, choosing to notice when we repeat the very harms we fight against. Building a shared future, specifically one that honors the complexities of Afro-Latinidad, requires deep listening, mutual respect, and the courage to transform together.

We invite paper proposals that explore accountability as an ethical, political, spiritual, and communal practice. We are particularly interested in the role of conflict mediation, restorative justice, and community-based peacemaking as tools for repair. Submissions may address (but are not limited to):

• Intercultural and intra-communal violence: Addressing anti-Blackness and hierarchy within Latine spaces.
• Accountability and repair within marginalized communities:  Moving beyond performance toward communal transformation.
• Restorative justice: Conflict mediation practices, restorative processes, and community-led reconciliation.
• Decolonial, feminist, and abolitionist visions of the future.
• Ethics of listening, responsibility, and relationality.
• The reproduction and interruption of harm in activist, faith-based, or social movements.
• Practices of transformation, healing, and collective becoming.

2. Title: “Latine Religious Imaginaries Against the Carceral State.”

Description: In a political season marked by tightening security at borders, expanding detention regimes, and increased racialized state-sponsored violence, this session invites papers that critically engage religious, spiritual, cultural, and political practices emerging from Latino/a and Latin American diasporas as sites of futuring beyond despair and superficial hope. We especially welcome work that attends to migration, forced displacement, deportation, the carceral and detention state, and ongoing realities of racial inequalities in the United States, the Americas and beyond. We invite papers that explore abolitionist thought, grassroots resistance, and economic creativity in the struggle for collective freedom. 

What sensory, embodied, and communal imaginaries emerge in response to contemporary uncertainties facing democracy, human rights, ecological well-being, and academic labor itself? This session seeks contributions that illuminate how Latino/a religious worlds critically assess inherited horizons of possibility while actively crafting futures grounded in justice, survival, and flourishing. Submissions may address (but are not limited to):

• How do communities of faith, sanctuary movements, and informal economies embody practices seeking to transform systems of scarcity and surveillance into networks of care, solidarity, and survival? 
• How might liberationist thought dialogue with U.S. Latinx resistance to reimagine a world beyond detention, deportation, and dispossession?
• Abolitionist and sanctuary practices in response to ICE and detention.
• Resistance economies and communal redistribution as liberatory praxis.
• Cross-religious coalitions confronting carcerality and state testing of dissent.

3. Title: “Convergences: Chicana Futurism & Ecofeminist Futures.”

Description: The intersection of Chicana Futurism and Ecofeminist Futures offers rich, yet under-explored, ground for research, creative work, and activism. By examining their overlapping themes, specifically a shared emphasis on decolonial, feminist, and ecological futures, we can identify generative entanglements between these fields. We invite proposals that pursue this synthesis, exploring how Chicana cultural production, speculative visioning, and feminist environmental justice converge to imagine decolonial, multispecies, and sustainable futures.

Recent works demonstrate overlap in themes, methodologies, and political commitments, particularly those engaging the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa, Chicana ecofeminist poetics, Decolonial Ecofeminism, and Latinx environmentalism. We seek work that draws from these Indigenous, spiritual and decolonial epistemologies to reimagine identity, cosmology, relationality, and resistance.

In the face of rising anti-intellectualism and censorship targeting Critical Race Theory and gender/sexuality studies, we ask how these convergences offer methods for subversion and survival. We welcome proposals from scholars, artists, and advocates that address:

• How creative methods, including fiction, visual arts, and digital media, function as speculative praxis to bypass colonial constraints and shape/reclaim the future-past.
• The ways in which the hybrid identity of the scholar-artist-advocate exists outside of formalized spaces and provides models for embodied counter-narratives
• How private spaces, such as kitchens and home altars, have historically functioned as sites of ecological subversion, sacred praxis, and feminist survival.

4. Title: “Volver al Futuro: 30 Years of HTI and the Changing Face of Latine Studies.”

Description: When the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI) was established in 1996, Latine scholars were often categorized as a statistical outlier in theological education, comprising less than 3% of PhD students and faculty. Today, while those numbers have more than doubled, the true story of HTI lies beyond the data. It is found in the "ripple effect" of a generation of scholars who have fundamentally reshaped the epistemologies, pedagogies, and the educational ecologies of the academy and the communities of practice they serve.

To mark HTI’s 30th anniversary, this session moves beyond institutional history to provide a critical academic evaluation of its impact on the Study of Religion and its vital contributions to the interdisciplinary field of Latine Studies. We seek to theorize the "HTI effect"—the ways in which the intentional cultivation of Latine scholarship has disrupted traditional theological canons and forced a reimagining of religious studies. We invite proposals that reflect on how this increased presence has shifted the intellectual landscape, identify the pedagogical gaps that remain, and analyze how the evolution of HTI reflects broader shifts in Latine religious identity, institutional power, and the "changing face" of the US religious landscape. Submissions may address (but are not limited to):

• How has the professionalization and networking of Latine scholars changed the "grammar" of religious and theological discourse?
• The impact of Latine faculty on curriculum design, mentoring models, and the "decolonizing" of the classroom.
• Institutional Power and Resistance: A critical look at the "doubling" of numbers, is it representative of genuine power-sharing or a managed inclusion within the neoliberal academy?
• Identifying new scholarly frontiers that the next generation of HTI scholars are currently navigating.
• Beyond the Academy: How HTI-trained scholars have influenced public theology, grassroots movements, and community-based religious practices.