Over the past year, I have had the opportunity and the privilege of serving as Vice President of LASA. In that role, I have come to appreciate even more keenly the importance of our Association. I have seen the passion and commitment of our academic leadership, the dedication and professionalism of the staff, and the extraordinary willingness of our members to step up and serve in the many roles that require voluntary participation. I’m deeply impressed by the breadth and vitality of our Association. I would like to offer a big shout-out to all the section chairs, chairs of tracks, and the committee members who contributed to the success of LASA2025 in San Francisco, and to those whose service will be vital to the success of LASA2026 in Paris. I want to offer special thanks to Javier Guerrero and Jo-Marie Burt who have guided the Association over the past two years, while also welcoming Gisela Zaremberg as our new Vice President.
I also want to reflect on the role of LASA at this current moment in history, foreground some governance and business issues, brief you on our planning for the next meeting, and share our thoughts about future meetings.
As I consider the year ahead, I am acutely aware of the crucial role that associations like ours can play in this current moment. From the United States to El Salvador, to Argentina, our universities and civil societies are under assault by powerful ideologues and fanatics. Many of our political leaders show no interest in research, teaching, and the value of public service, or worse they shutter important research institutions. In this context, professional associations have become voices in defense of academic freedom, advocates for the pursuit of knowledge, allies of civil society, and sources of critical thinking and creative expression which have always been essential to the health of our societies and the improvement of the human condition.
LASA has spoken out with moral clarity and urgency against numerous threats to the academic, professional, and advocacy communities we collectively represent, and we have joined with other associations that have conscientiously lent their voice to resistance to the abuse of power and violations of human rights. LASA welcomes initiatives from our members to speak out to the extent that they can without putting themselves at risk. One way to do this is by working with our Commission on Academic Freedom and Human Rights. In addition to responding to petitions to call attention to violations of academic freedom, the Commission is seeking proactively to strengthen our collective resilience. Among other initiatives, it is preparing a dossier on academic freedom for a future issue of LASA Forum. I was reminded of the importance of this work on the occasion of Dora María Téllez’s receipt of an honorary degree at the Sorbonne. In a brief conversation, she recalled how LASA spoke out on her behalf while she was in prison in Nicaragua. We should not underestimate the power of our voice—it matters to those who matter to us.
Our Association also matters because it provides an arena of active engagement in the life of our professions. Through LASA we set the intellectual agenda for the study of Latin America and the Caribbean. We do this by recognizing outstanding work, cultivating new generations, stimulating academic inquiry, and elevating the visibility of our researchers. We also do this in a way that affords an opportunity to practice the art of association. Much of the work of LASA is done in committees. As unheroic as it may sound, chairing and serving on committees is a vital part of our working lives, and doing it well demands civility and a shared commitment to the goods we can achieve together.
At the same time, we need to continuously evaluate our practices and strengthen the functioning of our association. One area in which I see opportunities for improvement is in the representation and participation of members. We have an elected body—the Executive Council—and its members are diligent and conscientious, but we all operate on a trustee model of representation. A significant change in representation in the Executive Council has already been made. Starting this year, there will be a representative of the sections with a voice and vote on the Executive Council. The new member will be elected by a universal vote of all LASA members. The change was proposed by Javier Guerrero and Jo-Marie Burt, accepted by the Sections Committee, and approved by the Executive Council. The Sections Committee is currently developing a process for proposing nominations, which will be reviewed by the Executive Council.
To be more inclusive, we need to widen the conversation around a range of issues and be as transparent as possible about our operations. To that end, I will use these letters to outline issues that we are grappling with at the level of the Executive Council. All of us welcome your views and suggestions.
- Governance. LASA has a highly efficient and professional permanent secretariat, while presidents rotate annually. To ensure strong academic leadership of the Association, we need to engage in ongoing collective deliberation. I will ask the Executive Council to create committees to review our governance and, if convenient, oversee a strategic and participatory planning process. This will create opportunities to involve members—both faculty and students—in reimagining the future of LASA as we approach our 60th anniversary.
- LASA’s Business Model. LASA strives to balance accessibility and sustainability. We have done what we can to keep fees from rising, especially for members in the Global South. At the same time, since the COVID-19 pandemic, LASA has not been fully recovering the costs of its activities. This suggests that we need to reconsider our business model. Members should not worry about LASA’s long-term sustainability: we have a substantial endowment. Our challenge is to cover operating expenses, and there are not many areas in which we can achieve greater efficiency.
- The Importance of the Humanities. Thanks to Javier Guerrero and his Program Committee, LASA2025 artfully showcased the humanities. We need to build on this and ensure that future congresses continue to represent the humanities as well as the social sciences. As a big, interdisciplinary tent, LASA should reflect the importance of the humanities in its congresses and its leadership.
LASA in Paris, 2026
It has been a great pleasure to work with the LASA2026 Program Committee, Juan Pablo Luna, Adela Pineda-Franco, and Natalia Sobrevilla, in preparation for the next Congress of LASA, to be held from May 26-30, 2026, in Paris. We chose “Republic and Revolution” as the conference theme. We hope it resonates with our membership and sets the tone for thinking big about Latin America in the context of the revolutionary transformations—including liberalism, republicanism, anti-colonialism, and democracy—through which Latin America has contributed to shaping the contemporary world. You will find a detailed discussion of the themes of the Congress in the Call for Papers here. In addition to the overall theme of the conference, we have created four special tracks: violent democracies, republics under oligarchic and popular pressure, constitutional aspirations and frustrations, and revolutionary legacies: culture and social protest in the digital age. The first theme is also the focus of this issue of LASA Forum and was extremely efficiently assembled and edited by Juan Pablo.
Building Bridges with Europe. I am also excited about the opportunity to build bridges with Europe. There are over a thousand LASA members who live and work in Europe, and we have reached out to them individually with invitations to participate and partner with us. I had the opportunity to participate in the conference of the European Council for Social Sciences Research on Latin America (CEISAL) in Paris this past June. LASA is now an official observer of that association, which will soon be based in Salamanca. We look forward to working with CEISAL to organize joint panels and other activities. We are also pursuing connections with a variety of institutions in France and throughout Europe and I hope that our Paris meeting will be featured in the annual “Semaines de l’Amérique latine et des Caraïbes” (SALC) organized annually by the French Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères. Next year, SALC happily coincides with LASA2026.
Our 60th Anniversary. LASA2026 offers us an opportunity for fundraising for core activities as well as for specific purposes. We are currently exploring the possibility of a fundraising activity to be held during the 2026 LASA Congress. A major goal of our fundraising activities is accessibility, especially for students, members from the Global South, and historically underrepresented—including indigenous, Afro-descendent, and LGBTQIA—communities.
How We Meet. The decision to hold LASA2026 in person was based on three considerations. First, the cost of a hybrid conference in Paris is prohibitive, guaranteeing that we would not recover costs. Second, the difference in time zones would make virtual participation awkward. For a participant in Mexico City or Lima, the day would begin around midnight and end at the beginning of the work day. Finally, we look forward to the kinds of interactions that are possible when we meet face to face, unmediated by technology, as well as the informal exchanges of ideas that can occur in the hallways and cafes around a conference. We will be live-streaming some of our activities to make them available to our members who cannot attend in person, and future meetings will be hybrid where feasible and appropriate. Some professional associations have experimented with alternating between in-person and virtual meetings. At the initiative of Jo-Marie Burt, LASA is also organizing regional meetings that provide opportunities to remain engaged with the association between annual congresses. We will continue to experiment and learn as we seek to do our best to serve our members.
Future LASA sites. The prevailing view in the Executive Council is that LASA should hold its congresses in Latin America and the Caribbean, ideally in universities. No site will ever be perfect, and there will always be trade-offs. To facilitate these decisions, we appointed a committee of four Executive Council members to assist the LASA Secretariat in identifying and evaluating sites for 2027. Although the complexity of these issues has caused delays in our decision-making, we have many options as we search for sites that are accessible, attractive, and appropriate. One option, which will be pursued for LASA in 2027, 2028, or 2029, will be the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile.
Let me close by saying we are operating in a global context of high uncertainty and risk. We can expect to face unprecedented challenges in our work as an Association, as we have over the past year, but our work has never been more important. In my statement as a candidate for the role of presidency, I emphasized both our pluralism and our common purpose. I look forward to working over the next year to reinforce both. I believe that by sustaining and strengthening our work together and preserving our rich diversity, we guarantee our ability to survive and thrive as a dynamic and influential community of scholars.