LASA Panel on Academic Relevance

The 2014 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association is coming right up in Chicago. I organized a roundtable to discuss the academia/policy divide, which is getting a lot of attention but no one has examined it specifically for U.S.-Latin American relations.




As an academic who is very interested in policy, this matters a lot to me. So I chose a group of people who are similarly interested but from different vantage points. So we have combinations of former policy makers/staffers who are now academics, people who publish on U.S.-Latin American relations, people who work in high-profile think tanks, etc. What can/should academics do now and into the future to avoid policy irrelevance? What does that even mean?

As you might guess, given what I write about on this blog and in my publications I'm really looking forward to the discussion. Join us if you can.