This seminar explores how structural and symbolic violence operate against marginalized bodies as mechanisms of control and exclusion within the contemporary global order, with particular attention to the Latin American context. From militarized borders and detention centers to the necropolitics of neoliberal disposability, violence is not only physical but also institutional, epistemic, and economic. Drawing on Sayak Valencia’s analysis of gore capitalism and border violence as commodified cruelty; María Lugones’ decolonial critique of postcolonial gender frameworks through the concept of “coloniality of gender”; Zygmunt Bauman’s reflections on economic excess and disposable lives; Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics as an extension of Foucault’s biopolitics; and Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago’s theorization of debt and precarity, this seminar invites critical and creative approaches to how violence produces categories of grievable and ungrievable life. Rather than isolated or exceptional events, these forms of violence are embedded in the routine operations of neoliberal capitalism, where racialized and gendered bodies are rendered both expendable and instrumental to political and economic systems. Violence against migrants, women, Indigenous communities, and LGBTQ+ individuals reveals a global order structured around hierarchies of mobility, labor, and legitimacy. At the U.S.–Mexico border and throughout the region, for instance, migrant bodies are constructed as threats while simultaneously exploited as flexible labor or mobilized as symbolic capital in nationalist discourse. Yet within these violent systems, there emerge practices of refusal, care, and collective resistance. Communities articulate narratives of dignity and survival; feminist and decolonial networks generate frameworks of mutual aid; and transnational solidarities produce counter-discourses to state and systemic violence. These acts of defiance invite us to imagine (re)generation not merely as healing or compensation, but as political reimagination. We welcome interdisciplinary research in English, Spanish, or Portuguese that explores how marginalized bodies are marked, erased, or resisted through narrative, visual culture, performance, and political discourse, with a focus on Latin America across historical periods.

Contact chairs:

Angel Diaz-Davalos (angel.diaz-davalos@lmu.edu)

Gabriela Diaz-Davalos (gdiazdavalos@csueastbay.edu)