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2026 Conference

SALALM LXXI
Politics of Place: Land and the State in Latin America, the Caribbean, and its Diasporas
June 8-11, 2026
Madison, WI
 
The Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials is pleased to announce its  71st annual conference being held June 8-11, 2026 in Madison, Wisconsin and hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. We hope you will join us in-person in Madison, a lively, scenic, and affordable midwestern city, for an inspiring community gathering and intellectual exchange.
 
The conference theme is “Politics of Place.” SALALM invites librarians, archivists, vendors, scholars, publishers, and students to participate in a dialogue exploring the ways in which we connect and relate to place, how the environment forms our way of life and practices, and how the state mediates our relationship to land as individuals, societies, and institutions.
 
The “Politics of Place” is a poignant theme for our conference at UW-Madison because of its status as a land-grant university. The first Morrill Act of 1862 provided fifty-seven institutions of higher education across the United States with appropriated Indigenous lands to fund their establishment as institutions with missions of agricultural teaching, research, and extension. Today, UW-Madison continues to reckon with the complex legacy of being a land-grant institution, making it a fitting place to interrogate questions of land and histories of state, sovereignty, and belonging that surround land. As SALALM gathers in Madison, we will also engage with the equally complex histories of people, place, and state in Latin America and the Caribbean.
 
Through panels, workshops, and a keynote session, the conference will prompt us to reflect on relationships to land and ways of being and knowing in the world as they vary across cultures, languages, knowledge systems, the Global South, and the Global North. These reflections will inform the dialogue about our collections and practices as information professionals, vendors, scholars, and publishers.