Across Latin America, environmental degradation, racialized and gendered violence, forced migration, labor exploitation, and urban precarity structure everyday life. In response, communities turn to cultural practices that sustain care, survival, and political imagination. Alongside literary fiction and visual cultures, performance traditions, oral histories, and digital media become sites where communities narrate loss, transmit knowledge, contest dispossession, and imagine futures beyond the limits imposed by dominant political and economic systems. Building on Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of space as socially produced, Arturo Escobar’s work on pluriversal politics, Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientização, and Ruth Levitas’s concept of “utopia as method,” among others, this panel understands empowerment as a spatial, cultural, and collective process through which communities move from conditions of imposed vulnerability toward forms of agency and belonging.

This panel invites work that examines empowerment not as a completed outcome, but as a contested and uneven process. Rather than treating marginalized communities as passive subjects of violence, we ask how cultural production, local knowledge(s), embodied practice, and collective memory reconfigure belonging and produce spaces of resistance. The panel also attends to the limits of empowerment, asking how practices of care, solidarity, and survival may reproduce internal hierarchies or lose transformative force when absorbed by institutions, markets, and the State. The central question guiding our inquiry is how empowerment is produced, contested, limited, and reimagined within specific cultural forms and social spaces. We welcome interdisciplinary papers in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Possible topics/areas include extractivism and environmental justice; Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, feminist, queer, and migrant forms of collective agency; embodied practices, cultural memory, and the institutional limits of empowerment.