Inaugural Lecture in Latino Studies: “Latino Studies 2.0: Black Lives, Brown Bodies and the Ends of the Democratic Commons in the Neoliberal University."

“Latino Studies 2.0” considers the contradictions that emerge when bodies of knowledge are confounded with racialized bodies in the academy at the dawning of a new civil rights era instantiated by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and the Brown Commons Project (BCP). In doing so, this talk proposes how Latino studies, as a latecomer to academic institutionalization, might reformulate the conditions under which the inclusion of endangered knowledge, and endangered bodies, is either granted or denied in the neoliberal university.

Lázaro Lima (Ph.D., Maryland) is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in the Liberal Arts and Professor of Latino Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond. His work centers on the political emergence of Latino forms of civic personhood, and the attendant institutional, juridical, and cultural industries that enable Latino democratic legibility and participation to emerge in civil society.