CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN, CARIBBEAN AND LATINO STUDIES

The Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies (CLACLS) of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst promotes research, teaching, and public education on the histories, cultures, and politics of Latin American and Caribbean peoples across the Americas and throughout the world. Bridging the divide that historically has separated Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies as institutionalized knowledge formations with distinctive intellectual genealogies, political trajectories, and bureaucratic moorings at U.S. universities is central to our mission. The Center seeks to be a hemispheric, crossborder space for critical reflection, exchange, and intellectual production. We aim to engage in genuinely inter-disciplinary work, fostering the creative convergence of discipline-based knowledges. CLACLS is committed to sustaining links with Latin American and Caribbean communities in the U.S. and across the Americas, as well as to bringing the alternative knowledge produced in those communities to bear on our teaching and research.

*pending approval

The core activities of the Center are:

. To promote excellence in research and teaching in the fields of Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies.

. To foster collaborative research and teaching among faculty and students involved in Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies in the Five Colleges, as well as with scholars and research institutions throughout the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America and other world regions.

. To sponsor Research Working Groups (RWGs) on issues central to Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies. RWGs currently convened by CLACLS core faculty include Social Movements and 21st Century Cultural and Political Transformations, Black Cultures and Racial Politics in the Americas, and TransnationalLatinidades and Cultural Production.

. To establish and maintain academic consortia with research institutions in the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean and other world regions, thereby facilitating transnational collaborative research and faculty and student exchanges centered in the above research themes and other areas of interest to CLACLS affiliates.

. To advance scholarly and public debate on Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies by sponsoring research colloquia, occasional lectures, workshops, conferences, film series, and other cultural and scholarly events and activities.

. To engage in fundraising, particularly to support of faculty and graduate student research and to consolidate linkages with U.S. research institutions and advocacy groups specializing in Latina/o Studies and with scholars, universities, independent research centers, non-governmental organizations and social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean.

*pending approval