ENGLISH | ESPAÑOL
Should I read everything beforehand?
Please read all of the papers for all of the sessions you plan on attending. The expectation is that you will participate actively in the discussions. This is not a conference where people perform. It is a dialogue in all senses of the word. Additionally, each panel has a set of roles that you may be asked to perform (this information is distributed in the conference program in advance):
If you are dominatrix: You are in charge of keeping the discussion fair and orderly during the session. Make sure that the presenters and commentators stay within their time limits and that certain people do not dominate the session. Keep a list of people who raise their hand in the discussion. If people have not spoken in a session and they want to speak, move them to the front of the line.
If you are presenting a paper: Please provide a three to five minute description of where the project is at, how it contributes to the general conversation at the institute, and what you are looking for from the readers.
If you are commenting: Prepare a maximum of seven minutes of comments that reflect on the main aspects of the essays and raise some questions for the group—and the authors, if ithese are essays by participants—to consider. Make the comments generative for the group discussion.
Will you have the readings there or should I bring them with me?
We will have a library of hardcopy and electronic versions of all participant papers and theory readings at the conference, but you can also download them to your computer and/or tablets and save some time.
Is there Internet there?
The main conference center has reliable WIFI internet, and the houses and posadas where you stay also have access.
Do I have to read all the theory articles?
Yes. These texts set the tone for the entire conference and our exploration of the theme. What separates Tepoz from other conferences is the spirit of collective and collaborative thinking that characterizes the panels. You will want to have read the theory articles in order to engage with some of the most interesting transnational thinkers.
What does a day at the Tepoztlán Institute look like?
Something like kuduro meets electro-cumbia – lively and danceable. The conference begins with a welcome dinner/bacchanal before participants rush back to their houses or posadas to reread theory readings for the first theory panel the following morning. Every full day includes breakfast, one morning session, lunch, and one afternoon session. Each session lasts 2-2.5 hours. Depending on how many people wind up attending, there will be between three and four individual mesas running during each session. Each mesa will consist of two or three paper presenters; two or three assigned commentators (discussants); and a dominatrix (moderator) to introduce and keep the queue. Then everyone else with an interest in that mesa’s theme who has read the posted items for that mesa participates, usually between ten and twenty people total. Readings will be posted in a Dropbox folder before the conference. Panelists have three to five minutes to frame their essays; discussants have seven minutes each to start the discussion off with their prepared comments (anad sometimes the discussants have met beforehand informally to plan a little). Then the discussion is thrown open.
On the first three mornings, we will read and discuss common “big picture” readings to get a theoretical lingua franca in place for the whole conference. (Last year, for example, we started with essays by Juan Flores, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Julio Ramos, and Edward Said.) There will be assigned commentators and dominatrixes for these “big picture” sessions as well as the participant essay sessions. There is one whole day off in the middle of the conference, usually Sunday, and plenty of down time in the later afternoons and evenings. Otherwise, the conference really hinges on full commitment to the sessions. Please don’t plan on drifting in and out—the effect is truly cumulative.
Non-participant significant others and self-guided offspring have had a good time in the past, and can count on joining us for meals and social events. Many years we are very lucky to have yoga sessions and hikes to the Tepozteco at the end of the afternoon panel.
Who attends this event?
Junior and senior faculty, activists and artists, and advanced graduate students from Latin America, North America, and Europe who come from various fields, including history, literature, area studies, anthropology, gender studies, and performance studies.
Who organizes this event?
The conference is organized by an international collective divided into equipos and led by a rotating core of Co-Directors.
The conference was founded by Pamela Voekel and Elliott Young in 2003. From the Ethos statement:
Since it was conceived in 2003, the two chief goals of this conference have been, first, to encourage real exchange scholars in Latin America and the United States—typically a very fraught relationship; and, second, to dispense with the professional politicking that reduces so many conferences to livestock shows. Instead, we have deliberately avoided inviting people who seem to be looking for a chance to show off or perform eminence in favor of people interested in having a series of intellectually satisfying, mostly bilingual, democratic seminars for grown-ups who miss being in a peer classroom.
Several points follow from this:
*You should not feel pressure to present your own work.
*There will be no featured speakers or VIPS.
*Everyone is encouraged to make an ass of him/herself at the annual cabaret and dance party on Saturday night.
Does my work have to be transnational?
Yes, your work has to be transnational in some way, either explicitly or informed by transnational thinking. Commitment to transnational scholarship is at the heart of the Institute. From the Mission Statement:
Our contemporary world makes increasingly visible that the modern nation is both an ideological and historical construct. The rise of international economic and political blocs like Mercosur, CARICOM, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas; the constraints imposed on individual nations by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization; and the United States’s pre-emptive military interventions against sovereign nations: all of these have forced historians to consider the centrality of transnationalism to the history of the modern nation state. Scholars of transnational phenomena foreground the circulation of people, culture, and capital operating on registers both greater and smaller than the nation state. Much of the recent debate around "globalization" views it as a new phenomenon, but the origins of this global order stretch back at least to the nineteenth century, and arguably to the sixteenth-century emergence of global capitalism. This institute will grapple with the roots of the new global order through the collaborative creation of transnational histories of the Americas.
Students in graduate programs mostly continue to receive country- and region-specific training and don't have adequate exposure to transnational history. Added to these impediments, North and Latin American scholarly communities have few opportunities for dialogue, and the rhythm of work at international conferences does not make for fruitful dialogue. This Institute will facilitate an intensive dialogue between North American and Latin American graduate students and junior and senior faculty members.
Do I have to be a historian to attend?
No. Participants come from a number of disciplines. One need not be a historian to apply. In fact, the collective is composed of scholars of History, English, Spanish and Portuguese Literature, American Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literature. The transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations—and all other things trans- —that develop in the course of the conference challenge the historical roots of globalization.
Please read all of the papers for all of the sessions you plan on attending. The expectation is that you will participate actively in the discussions. This is not a conference where people perform. It is a dialogue in all senses of the word. Additionally, each panel has a set of roles that you may be asked to perform (this information is distributed in the conference program in advance):
If you are dominatrix: You are in charge of keeping the discussion fair and orderly during the session. Make sure that the presenters and commentators stay within their time limits and that certain people do not dominate the session. Keep a list of people who raise their hand in the discussion. If people have not spoken in a session and they want to speak, move them to the front of the line.
If you are presenting a paper: Please provide a three to five minute description of where the project is at, how it contributes to the general conversation at the institute, and what you are looking for from the readers.
If you are commenting: Prepare a maximum of seven minutes of comments that reflect on the main aspects of the essays and raise some questions for the group—and the authors, if ithese are essays by participants—to consider. Make the comments generative for the group discussion.
Will you have the readings there or should I bring them with me?
We will have a library of hardcopy and electronic versions of all participant papers and theory readings at the conference, but you can also download them to your computer and/or tablets and save some time.
Is there Internet there?
The main conference center has reliable WIFI internet, and the houses and posadas where you stay also have access.
Do I have to read all the theory articles?
Yes. These texts set the tone for the entire conference and our exploration of the theme. What separates Tepoz from other conferences is the spirit of collective and collaborative thinking that characterizes the panels. You will want to have read the theory articles in order to engage with some of the most interesting transnational thinkers.
What does a day at the Tepoztlán Institute look like?
Something like kuduro meets electro-cumbia – lively and danceable. The conference begins with a welcome dinner/bacchanal before participants rush back to their houses or posadas to reread theory readings for the first theory panel the following morning. Every full day includes breakfast, one morning session, lunch, and one afternoon session. Each session lasts 2-2.5 hours. Depending on how many people wind up attending, there will be between three and four individual mesas running during each session. Each mesa will consist of two or three paper presenters; two or three assigned commentators (discussants); and a dominatrix (moderator) to introduce and keep the queue. Then everyone else with an interest in that mesa’s theme who has read the posted items for that mesa participates, usually between ten and twenty people total. Readings will be posted in a Dropbox folder before the conference. Panelists have three to five minutes to frame their essays; discussants have seven minutes each to start the discussion off with their prepared comments (anad sometimes the discussants have met beforehand informally to plan a little). Then the discussion is thrown open.
On the first three mornings, we will read and discuss common “big picture” readings to get a theoretical lingua franca in place for the whole conference. (Last year, for example, we started with essays by Juan Flores, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Julio Ramos, and Edward Said.) There will be assigned commentators and dominatrixes for these “big picture” sessions as well as the participant essay sessions. There is one whole day off in the middle of the conference, usually Sunday, and plenty of down time in the later afternoons and evenings. Otherwise, the conference really hinges on full commitment to the sessions. Please don’t plan on drifting in and out—the effect is truly cumulative.
Non-participant significant others and self-guided offspring have had a good time in the past, and can count on joining us for meals and social events. Many years we are very lucky to have yoga sessions and hikes to the Tepozteco at the end of the afternoon panel.
Who attends this event?
Junior and senior faculty, activists and artists, and advanced graduate students from Latin America, North America, and Europe who come from various fields, including history, literature, area studies, anthropology, gender studies, and performance studies.
Who organizes this event?
The conference is organized by an international collective divided into equipos and led by a rotating core of Co-Directors.
The conference was founded by Pamela Voekel and Elliott Young in 2003. From the Ethos statement:
Since it was conceived in 2003, the two chief goals of this conference have been, first, to encourage real exchange scholars in Latin America and the United States—typically a very fraught relationship; and, second, to dispense with the professional politicking that reduces so many conferences to livestock shows. Instead, we have deliberately avoided inviting people who seem to be looking for a chance to show off or perform eminence in favor of people interested in having a series of intellectually satisfying, mostly bilingual, democratic seminars for grown-ups who miss being in a peer classroom.
Several points follow from this:
*You should not feel pressure to present your own work.
*There will be no featured speakers or VIPS.
*Everyone is encouraged to make an ass of him/herself at the annual cabaret and dance party on Saturday night.
Does my work have to be transnational?
Yes, your work has to be transnational in some way, either explicitly or informed by transnational thinking. Commitment to transnational scholarship is at the heart of the Institute. From the Mission Statement:
Our contemporary world makes increasingly visible that the modern nation is both an ideological and historical construct. The rise of international economic and political blocs like Mercosur, CARICOM, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas; the constraints imposed on individual nations by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization; and the United States’s pre-emptive military interventions against sovereign nations: all of these have forced historians to consider the centrality of transnationalism to the history of the modern nation state. Scholars of transnational phenomena foreground the circulation of people, culture, and capital operating on registers both greater and smaller than the nation state. Much of the recent debate around "globalization" views it as a new phenomenon, but the origins of this global order stretch back at least to the nineteenth century, and arguably to the sixteenth-century emergence of global capitalism. This institute will grapple with the roots of the new global order through the collaborative creation of transnational histories of the Americas.
Students in graduate programs mostly continue to receive country- and region-specific training and don't have adequate exposure to transnational history. Added to these impediments, North and Latin American scholarly communities have few opportunities for dialogue, and the rhythm of work at international conferences does not make for fruitful dialogue. This Institute will facilitate an intensive dialogue between North American and Latin American graduate students and junior and senior faculty members.
Do I have to be a historian to attend?
No. Participants come from a number of disciplines. One need not be a historian to apply. In fact, the collective is composed of scholars of History, English, Spanish and Portuguese Literature, American Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literature. The transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations—and all other things trans- —that develop in the course of the conference challenge the historical roots of globalization.