Sustaining Life between Popular and Illicit Economies
June 5-7, 2025
Puebla, MX
Download the 2025 Conference Program here.
Organized with the Extended Reproduction Research Group of FLACSO Ecuador and the Permanent Seminar on Communal Articulations and Political Forms of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), Mexico, by Soledad Álvarez Velasco of the University of Illinois Chicago, Lucia Linsalata of BUAP and Cristina Cielo of FLACSO.
Call For Papers
Please follow this link for the Call in Spanish.
Por favor seguir este enlace para ver la convocatoria en castellano.
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.
Ethnographic approaches show us the difficulty of both analytically and empirically separating formal from informal strategies, legal from illegal dynamics, productive from reproductive work, and political economies and global mobilities from everyday practices in local contexts (Simone 2022, Federici 2021, Mezzadri 2019, Tsing 2005). Informed by such analyses, as well as studies of past or non-capitalist economic strategies that operated outside of dominant systems to help to provision marginalized people in tumultuous political, social or economic times (Denning 2010, Narotsky and Besnier 2014), we seek 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. We are particularly interested in identifying collaborative and mobile strategies of social reproduction, both in the present in the past, that have emerged to resist increasing processes of exploitation through popular economic practices that rearticulate community, translocal and cross-border connections and networks.
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 (Gago 2017, Urban Popular Economy Collective 2022). Feminist economic analyses point to the importance attending to marginalized populations’ provisioning practices in contexts of capitalist expansion (Vega 2019, Mies 2014). 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 (Álvarez and Bayón 2024, Mezzadra and Nielson 2013).
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 illicit circuits: families members migrate through illegalized 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.
We welcome papers on topics related to but certainly not limited to the following inquiries:
- How do precarious populations maintain and reproduce life in the context of economic crises and violence, in the past as in today’s contexts? What role do non-sanctioned economies play in their sustenance?
- How do such populations nourish themselves not only materially but also in socially meaningful terms, negotiating, collaborating, or disputing the management of resources and values in order to sustain themselves and their collectives?
- How are economies of unsalaried work, informality and illegality produced across multiple spaces subject to multiple and heterogenous violences and territorial control?
- What are the continuities and interdependencies between reproductive and popular practices, traversing legal, illicit and transborder economies?
- How are different scales or sites articulated to sustain bodies, families, and communities, as these articulations cross both political borders as well as conceptual frontiers such as the formal and informal, the legal and illegal, the popular and the institutionalized?
- What are the logistics and institutions necessary for the reproduction of marginalized and illegalized bodies and territories?
- What intersubjectivities are constituted at the interactions of formal, popular and illicit and illegalized economic practices?
- How do people cooperate across varied spaces, social relations and organizations to negotiate and dispute their sustenance?
Abstracts will be received through the SEA Submission Site through February 24, 2025. Event registration is open on the AAA portal. For more information, please contact Cristina Cielo at mccielo@flacso.edu.ec.
Transportation, Accommodations, and Field Visit
When traveling to Puebla, MX, the nearest airport is Puebla International Airport (PBC). Transportation options from the airport include taxis, private services, shared shuttles, and buses to Puebla’s city center and nearby towns; auto rentals are also available from the airport. Downtown Puebla is approximately 30-40 minutes from the airport by car, depending on traffic conditions.
For those of you flying into Mexico City, here is some bus information to get from Mexico City to Puebla:
- There are continuous buses from Mexico City to Puebla. It takes about two and a half hours and there are departures every half hour from Mexico City bus terminals to Puebla.
- The Puebla terminal is called CAPU and once you arrive, it is best to take a taxi from CAPU to the center of Puebla, it should cost about 100 pesos.
- There are also direct buses from the CDMX airport to Puebla. The two companies that provide service from the airport are Estrella Roja and ADO, though check the times as they do not run every half hour to the airport.
Nearby hotel recommendations
You can follow this link for a list of downtown hotels and hostels within walking distance of the Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. (Para ver las recomendaciones de hoteles y hostales en el centro de Puebla en español, por favor seguir aquí.)
Guided Field Visit
Join us for a guided field visit with artisan and other popular economy workers in Nueva San Salvador, an urban peripheral neighborhood of Puebla. You can find more information here.
The field visit will take place on June 5, 2025, from 8am-3pm and includes transportation, lunch and visits and discussions with locals. You can sign up for $40 when you register for the event on the AAA portal.
Works Cited
Álvarez Velasco, Soledad and Manuel Bayón. 2021. “Por trocha”: Circumventing the Episodical Criminalization of Migration in the Andes. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 709.1: 24-45.
Denning, Michael. 2010. Wageless life. New left review 66.6: 79-97.
Federici, Silvia. 2021. Patriarchy of the wage: Notes on Marx, gender, and feminism. PM Press.Evemt
Gago, Verónica. 2017. Neoliberalism from below: Popular pragmatics and baroque economies. Duke University Press.
Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press.
Mezzadri, Alessandra. 2019. On the value of social reproduction: Informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics. Radical philosophy 2.4: 33-41.
Mies, Maria. 2014. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Narotzky, Susana, and Niko Besnier. 2014. Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy. Current anthropology 55: S4-S16.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2022. The surrounds: Urban life within and beyond capture. Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
The Urban Popular Economy Collective. 2022. Urban Popular Economies: Territories of Operation for Lives Deemed Worth Living. Public Culture 34.3: 333–357.
Vega Solís, Cristina. 2019. Reproducción social y cuidados en la reinvención de lo común. Aportes conceptuales y analíticos desde los feminismos. Revista de Estudios Sociales 70: 49-63.
