Cartographies of Movement • Cartografías del movimiento • Cartografias do Movimento

Buenos Aires, Argentina (July 22-27, 2024)

The 2024 Dance Studies Association meeting in Buenos Aires will be our organization’s first major gathering outside of North America and Europe. This occasion aims to facilitate new routes and roots of local and international exchange and dialogic (un)learning in the field of dance studies. At the same time, it beckons us to engage critically with the violences embedded in practices and narratives of expansion and mapping. Cartography refers to the practice of making and using maps. Cartographic practices were integral to the conquest and invention of the Americas and to the subjugation of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. During the colonial era and beyond, maps (among other modes of cataloging territories, beings, and knowledges) functioned as tools of domination, imposing Western and Christian spatial and temporal dimensions on diverse communities and geographies. In Argentina, the so called “conquest of the desert” (1878-1885) carried out the most devastating genocide of Indigenous peoples in the country’s history in order to expand and claim the space of the nation, exemplifying the practice of cartography and territoriality as the violent erasure of the Other.