On March 17 – 20, 2026, the second annual International Conference of Critical Legal Geography occurred at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. Funded in part by the LSA Advance Grant, the conference provided a space for around 100 transdisciplinary scholars to engage with Latin American legal geographic thought, with a special focus on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and spatial legal pluralism. In addition to two roundtable discussions, “Politics & Contestations – What Role for Critical Legal Geography?” and “On the Geographies of Critical Legal Geography,” the program featured two keynote addresses.
The first, “Territorio como espacio relacional y base de todas las vidas. Conocimiento Mapuche en un context intercultural,” was given by Dra. Elisa Loncón Antileo, a Mapuche linguist and the inaugural President of Chile’s Constitutional Convention. The second, “The difference that critical legal geography makes: precarity, property, and power,” was given by Dr. Nicholas Blomley, professor of geography at Simon Fraser University and a foundational figure in critical legal geography.
The conference is the first of two Critical Legal Geography programs receiving funding from the 2026 LSA Advance Grant Program. The second, the 2027 Summer School on Indigenous Legal Geographies, will convene 15 to 20 academics, early-career researchers, and graduate students for intensive training and support in the study of Indigenous legal traditions, geographies, environmental relations, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and posthumanism.