The 2025 SEA meeting proposes to explore constellations of practices and strategies for sustaining life through activities that are not necessarily part of formal or even legal work and commerce. Our call seeks to explore the expansion, heterogenization and transformation of these practices and economies, questioning concepts of periphery, marginality and exclusion in order to analyze processes of capital valorization in local and transnational spaces of dispute and conflict over legitimate orders. The conference will be held in Puebla, Mexico. A colonial city located near Mexico City, the location allows for consideration of past and present economies while drawing on pioneering Latin American debates in popular, feminist and spatialized economies.
This meeting seeks to promote discussions around the collaborative aspects at stake for majority populations, whose lives in many parts of the world are increasingly precarious and ever more traversed by illicit trade and traffic, territorial and spatialized control and regulation, and multiple and diverse violences. Popular economy perspectives allow us to examine such strategies in their most plural sense, as a set of diverse and even contradictory experiences and practices, that constantly exceed our conceptual categories, and as such, have continually reorganized modes of organization and cooperation, as well as political subjectivities. Feminist economic analyses point to the importance attending to marginalized populations’ provisioning practices in contexts of capitalist expansion. This means understanding the increasingly complex work of taking care, in negotiation with not only state and private, but also illicit organizations and actors. Finally, a spatial approach to translocal and transnational economies allows us to read popular sectors’ multiple and variegated strategies of stabilization and dispute in the context of economic and political crises inscribed into multiple and unequal territories marked by incessant mobilities and inmobilities.
Framed by these perspectives, we seek to put anthropological and archeological studies into discussion to help us understand the ways that neoliberal destructuring of salaried work and public services have made it increasingly difficult for marginalized populations to function completely separately from illegalized circuits: families members migrate through trans-border trajectories, contraband provides possibilities for both work and affordable goods, young people find diversified labor opportunities in expanding criminalized networks. Explorations of actually existing popular economies from feminist perspectives will help us better understand the intensification and transformation of strategies to guarantee reproduction over multiple territories.
The 2025 SEA meeting “Sustaining Life between Popular and Illicit Economies” will be bilingual, with translations and exchanges in English and in Spanish. We hope that our exchanges in this SEA meeting will help us explore the recreation of common modes of existence that allow popular sectors to establish lives worth living in increasingly difficult conditions for their reproduction, particularly with the multiplication of interconnections between popular and illicit economies. Please see https://econanthro.org/meet/2025-sea-45th-annual-meeting/ for a full description of the call including papers topics of particular interest.
Abstracts will be received through the SEA Submission Site through February 3rd, 2025. For more information, please contact Cristina Cielo at mccielo@flacso.edu.ec