2026 Theme
“Horizons of action y futures at risk: alternatives to the past and present”
The notion of “horizon” can be understood as a temporal as well as spatial metaphor. It evokes a critical kaleidescope that channels the imagination of the future through views of the past. With this idea in mind, we invite participants to consider the crisis of experience that assails our present; and to develop perspectives that draw on theoretical and conceptual innovations that prompt a deeper reflection of the diverse temporalities that constitute our present, each partially visible in the form of a palimpsest. How do we mobilize geographic imaginaries that reconceptualize territory, distance, migrancies, and new modes of global configuration? In seeking to avoid the trap of an unanchored presentism, we ask: what responses to the experience of obliteration existed in the past; and in what form do they persist even today? What languages do they propose? What meanings of the future do we develop as a response to the status quo? In addition to invoking history or memory as pedagogies and critical archives, whether confabulatory or impossible, we seek to reflect on the uses and reinventions of the past, with an emphasis on the ways in which diverse futures, dystopias, and ucronias were imagined in order to evoke resistance, change, and strategies for cultural preservation.
In this general context, the social sciences and humanities also see themselves in crisis, leading both to interrogate their foundations. The open attack on knowledge led by a new Right further demonstrates the critical potentiality that some find threatening. How then, can we consider horizons of action from these fields of knowledge: ones that neither override nor instrumentalize subaltern voices? What legacies and affiliations can we reinvent? What futures, be they in the form of poetics, embodiments, or subjectivities, can we call upon to dispel the perplexity and paralysis that the notion of crisis itself reproduces? Is it possible to imagine new projects and hopes based on the epistemic tools that these knowledges provide? Finally, what responsibility do we share in the circulation and imminence of discourses of exclusionary violence?
Last year, the Tepoztlán Institute considered possible readings / interpretations for decoding the crises of paradigms, concepts, even (models of) democracy itself; against emergent authoritarian forms of governmentality and forms of symbolic violence that stigmatize and consolidate inequality and subjection. We sought to interrogate the new or original element(s) of our present, while also considering the structural and endemic features that organize our societies following the pandemic. In 2026 we propose to continue the conversation, focusing on possible actions in these critical contexts. We are interested in not only thinking through “resistance” on the level of movements and advocacy but also reconsidering the diffuse limits of negotiation and consent: calling attention to the divergent languages, critiques of common sense, and the different utopias, even heterotopias, that are in the process of being born.
The idea this year is to lend intelligibility to our present through the imagination of future horizons, with the goal of establishing new agreements, new forms of dialogue, and new forms of listening.
Suggested themes:
Conceptual aphasia: how do we theorize the present and invent a future given the present scenario?
Forms of future past: how were other possible horizons imagined, written (about), or symbolized in contexts of crisis?
Spatial imaginations: disputed territories, threatened resources, displacements, migrancies.
Forms of imagination: utopias, dystopias, heterotopias.
Forms and platforms of action: activisms, militancies, dissidences.
The historicity of authoritarianisms and resistances to them on the continent.
Temporalities, archives, uses of the past: continuity, rupture, repetition, anachronism.
Resist, negotiate, accommodate? Forms of opposition and dissidence under authoritarian initiatives in the present.
Other epistemologies: divergent temporalities, displaced connections.
Connective poetics: horizons of desire in literature and the arts.
Authoritarianisms and the modularity of the archive: historical forms of authority and control; strategies of resistance.
Authoritarianisms, corporealities, normativity: gender at stake (again).
Violence and its elementary forms: horizons of symbolization, intervention, eradication.