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CALL FOR PAPERS - SYMPOSIUM


SETTLING IN THE SELF-BUILT CITY: SOUTH-SOUTH MIGRATION AND URBANBORDERSCAPES

November 5-6, 2026

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

 

This two-day symposium, organized at the University of Amsterdam, aims to bring together important scholarly contributions on themes scaffolding our research project Contesting Urban Borderscapes in Latin America. The event will take place in and around our city-center campus and the main venue is the beautiful Allard Pierson Museum. Our research project investigates the social dynamics of self-built neighbourhoods in Latin America that receive large migrant populations from neighbouring countries, with case studies in Moravia (Medellín, Colombia) and La Carpio (San José, Costa Rica). This is a timely topic, as increasing US interference in the region reminds us. Massive transnational displacement in a South-South context looms large again. 

The symposium invites scholars working with theories and methodologies related to SouthSouth migration; settlement community governance; social integration and exclusion; memory and narrative; and notions of bordering, ordering and symbolic boundaries, who are interested in participating in this encounter to submit a 250-word abstract. As we aim to publish a selection of papers as a special issue following the symposium, we are requesting original, previously unpublished work.

 

The symposium will be based on in-person participation only. Meals will be provided. We offer two travel grants to promising scholars from low-income countries. We end the symposium on Friday afternoon with a public keynote lecture (CEDLA Lecture Series) and the inauguration of the photographic exhibition 'Arriving and Belonging in the Self-Built City: Newcomers' Narrations in Photovoice'. ​

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