Where will the 13th IASA World Congress be held?

The congress will be held in Mérida, MEX.

What is the duration of the 13th IASA World Congress?

The congress spans several days, beginning in the middle of the week and concluding at the end of the week.

Will there be opportunities for international collaboration at the congress?

Yes, the congress is designed as an international forum, fostering collaboration among participants from various countries and backgrounds in Mérida.

13th IASA World Congress 2027

Name: 13th IASA World Congress 2027
Start: 2027-02-17T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-02-19T00:00:00Z
Location: Mérida

Feb 17–19, 2027Mérida, MexicoIn-person

Registration open

The 13th IASA World Congress is scheduled to take place in Mérida, Mexico. This international gathering serves as a critical forum for scholars and practitioners to engage with contemporary issues and advancements in their respective fields. The congress is designed to foster intellectual exchange and collaboration among participants from diverse backgrounds.

Committees & topics

Topics
History and Archaeology of the Human Senses and Sensual Experience · Cultural Studies and Analyses of Embodiment and the Senses in the Contemporary Americas · Power Relations and the Sensorial and Sensual · Embodiment and Performance in Their Multitude of Forms and Meanings · The Senses in Food, Music, Visual Arts, and Film and Media Studies · Literary, Artistic, Cultural and Popular Representations of the Body and Sensuality · The Politics of the Senses and Sensuality · The Senses of Embodiment in Past and Contemporary Americas

Why it matters

The IASA World Congress provides a unique platform for global dialogue, bringing together experts to address pressing challenges and explore innovative solutions. Such international conferences are vital for advancing knowledge and shaping future discourse, particularly in an increasingly interconnected world. The concentration of diverse perspectives in a single location facilitates cross-cultural understanding and the development of globally relevant strategies.

Furthermore, the congress's location in Mérida, MEX, offers a significant opportunity to highlight regional insights and contributions to global discussions. This geographical focus can enrich the overall dialogue, ensuring that a broader spectrum of experiences and viewpoints are considered. The event's structure encourages deep engagement with complex topics, moving beyond superficial discussions to foster meaningful intellectual growth and professional networking.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the 13th IASA World Congress should focus on understanding the core themes likely to be discussed, which often revolve around interdisciplinary approaches to global challenges. Reviewing past congress proceedings can provide valuable insight into recurring topics and the intellectual trajectory of the organization. Preparing a concise summary of one's own research or professional contributions relevant to these themes will facilitate effective participation.

Consideration should also be given to the cultural context of the host city, Mérida, MEX. Familiarity with local customs and professional etiquette can enhance networking opportunities and overall engagement. Participants might also find it beneficial to explore the concept of "Engagement Strategies" to maximize their interactions and ensure their contributions are impactful. Understanding the various stakeholders involved in the congress, potentially through a "Stakeholder Mapping Workshop," can also be advantageous for navigating the event effectively.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Mexico

Host nation, providing cultural context and regional perspectives.

Role in topic

As the host country, MEX offers a unique cultural and geographical backdrop for the congress, potentially influencing discussions with regional insights and perspectives on global issues. The location in Mérida can highlight local academic and professional contributions.

United States

Significant participant due to academic and research contributions.

Role in topic

The USA is typically a major contributor to international academic and professional congresses, bringing substantial research, diverse scholarly perspectives, and often leading discussions on various global topics.

Canada

Active participant, often bridging North American and global viewpoints.

Role in topic

CAN often plays a role in international forums by offering perspectives that can bridge those of the USA and other global regions, contributing to a balanced and comprehensive dialogue.

United Kingdom

Historical academic influence and diverse research contributions.

Role in topic

The GBR has a long-standing tradition of academic excellence and research, making it a significant participant in international congresses, often contributing to theoretical frameworks and historical analyses.

France

Contributor to intellectual discourse and cultural perspectives.

Role in topic

FRA typically contributes to international intellectual discourse with unique cultural and philosophical perspectives, enriching discussions and offering alternative viewpoints on global challenges.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

History and Archaeology of the Human Senses and Sensual Experience

The historical study of the senses emerged as a distinct field in the late twentieth century, building on Lucien Febvre and the Annales School's call to recover the affective and perceptual worlds of the past. Scholars such as Alain Corbin, Constance Classen, and David Howes argued that sensory hierarchies — the privileging of sight in Western modernity, for instance — are themselves historical constructions, and that smell, touch, taste, and hearing have organized social life in ways often invisible to text-based history. Archaeology has followed suit, with sensory and phenomenological approaches (Tilley, Hamilakis) reconstructing how ancient peoples experienced ritual spaces, food, perfume, and music. The core methodological dispute concerns evidence and interpretation: how can scholars recover ephemeral experiences from material remains, texts written by elites, or cross-cultural analogies without imposing modern sensory categories? Debates also turn on whether the senses are biologically universal or culturally constituted, and how colonial encounters reshaped indigenous sensoria. Today the field is expanding through interdisciplinary work that integrates neuroscience, museum studies, and digital reconstruction, while remaining attentive to the politics of whose sensory pasts get recovered and displayed.

Key players

Cultural Studies and Analyses of Embodiment and the Senses in the Contemporary Americas

Cultural studies in the Americas has long engaged embodiment through the legacies of conquest, slavery, indigenous cosmologies, and mass migration. From the Latin American tradition of cuerpo and corporalidad (Nelly Richard, Néstor García Canclini, Diana Taylor's 'repertoire') to U.S. and Canadian work on race, gender, and disability (Judith Butler, bell hooks, Alondra Nelson), scholars have treated the body as a site where power, memory, and identity are negotiated. The senses have entered this conversation through studies of Afro-diasporic religion, indigenous ritual, urban soundscapes, culinary mestizaje, and the visual cultures of borderlands. Contemporary debates concern how neoliberal economies, digital media, and pandemics have reshaped embodied experience across the hemisphere — from the sensorial labor of care workers to the algorithmic mediation of touch and presence. Scholars also grapple with decolonizing sensory studies, centering Black, indigenous, and queer epistemologies that resist Cartesian mind-body splits. The field today is marked by hemispheric and transnational frames that connect, rather than separate, Latin American, Caribbean, and North American experiences.

Key players

Power Relations and the Sensorial and Sensual

The recognition that power operates through the senses has roots in Foucault's analyses of discipline and biopolitics, Fanon's account of the racialized body under colonialism, and feminist theorizations of the male gaze (Mulvey) and the sexual division of sensory labor. Scholars have since shown that what societies permit to be seen, heard, smelled, touched, or desired is structured by class, race, gender, sexuality, and empire — from Jim Crow's segregated sensoria to colonial olfactory hierarchies that coded the colonized as malodorous. Current scholarship examines how surveillance technologies, urban design, advertising, and policing produce differential sensory regimes, and how marginalized communities cultivate counter-sensoria of resistance — in protest sound, queer nightlife, culinary reclamation, and indigenous ceremony. Debates center on whether the sensual can be a genuine site of liberation or is always already captured by capital and the state, and on how scholars should attend to pleasure without romanticizing it.

Key players

Embodiment and Performance in Their Multitude of Forms and Meanings

Performance studies emerged in the 1980s through the work of Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and later Diana Taylor and Peggy Phelan, treating embodied practice — ritual, theater, dance, protest, everyday gesture — as a primary mode of knowledge transmission rather than a derivative of text. Taylor's distinction between the 'archive' and the 'repertoire' was particularly influential in the Americas, arguing that embodied memory carries histories that written records cannot. Contemporary work spans live art, drag and ballroom cultures, indigenous ceremony, digital performance, sports, and the choreographies of social movements. Debates concern liveness in the age of streaming, the ethics of representing trauma through the body, the boundaries between performance and ritual, and how disabled, trans, and racialized performers reconfigure dominant aesthetics. The field continues to push against disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, theater, art history, and political theory.

Key players

The Senses in Food, Music, Visual Arts, and Film and Media Studies

The 'sensory turn' has reshaped multiple cultural disciplines. Food studies, drawing on Sidney Mintz, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and the proliferation of gastronomy programs, examines taste and smell as carriers of memory, migration, and identity. Sound studies (Jonathan Sterne, Ana María Ochoa) has reframed music as one practice within broader sonic cultures shaped by technology and politics. Art history has moved beyond opticality toward multisensory and haptic analyses, while film and media studies — building on Vivian Sobchack's phenomenology and Laura Marks's 'haptic visuality' — investigate how screens engage the whole body. Key debates include how digital platforms flatten or amplify sensory experience, how ASMR, mukbang, and VR reconfigure intimacy and taste, and how non-Western aesthetics challenge Euro-American sensory canons. Across these subfields, scholars increasingly ask how attention, algorithmic curation, and platform capitalism shape what audiences see, hear, and taste — and who gets to produce sensory culture for global circulation.

Key players

Literary, Artistic, Cultural and Popular Representations of the Body and Sensuality

Representations of the body and sensuality have been central to literary and artistic traditions across the Americas, from colonial-era depictions of indigenous bodies and the eroticized exoticism of the tropics, to nineteenth-century realism, modernist experimentation, and the explicit corporealities of contemporary fiction, telenovela, reggaeton, and graphic novels. Critical traditions — psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and disability studies — have analyzed how texts and images discipline, liberate, or commodify the sensual body. Current debates examine the global circulation of body images via social media, the politics of representation in #MeToo and body-positivity discourses, censorship and obscenity law, and how popular genres such as romance, horror, and pornography construct sensual norms. Scholars also revisit archives to recover non-normative bodies — fat, disabled, trans, indigenous, elderly — that mainstream representation has marginalized, asking how representation shapes lived embodiment in turn.

Key players

The Politics of the Senses and Sensuality

Jacques Rancière's notion of the 'distribution of the sensible' crystallized a long-running insight: politics is fundamentally about what can be perceived, said, and felt, and by whom. From debates over public monuments and protest aesthetics to censorship of music and dance, sensual life is a terrain of political contest. In the Americas, this has played out through struggles over indigenous ceremony, abortion and bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ rights, drug policy, and the regulation of nightlife and street vending. Contemporary issues include the policing of public space and odor, sensory accessibility for disabled citizens, the politicization of food sovereignty, and conflicts over what constitutes obscenity in increasingly polarized media environments. Scholars debate whether sensorial politics offers a productive supplement to rights-based frameworks or risks aestheticizing structural inequalities. Rising authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, and climate disruption are reshaping the political stakes of what people are permitted — and able — to sense.

Key players

The Senses of Embodiment in Past and Contemporary Americas

The Americas have long been imagined — by outsiders and inhabitants alike — through embodied tropes: the 'New World' as sensorial abundance, indigenous bodies as objects of ethnographic curiosity, enslaved African bodies as labor and spectacle, and immigrant bodies as vectors of cultural mixture. Pre-Columbian civilizations such as the Mexica, Maya, Inca, and many others organized cosmologies around bodily practices — bloodletting, feasting, dance, textile, ritual scent — that colonialism violently disrupted and partially absorbed. Afro-descendant and creole traditions, from Candomblé to vodou to jazz, forged new sensoria from these encounters. Contemporary scholarship traces continuities and ruptures: how colonial sensory hierarchies persist in racialized policing and beauty norms; how migration reshapes culinary, linguistic, and tactile worlds; and how indigenous resurgence movements reclaim embodied knowledge against extractive states. Debates concern how to write hemispheric histories of embodiment without flattening enormous diversity, and how to balance attention to suffering with recognition of pleasure, beauty, and agency in American bodily life.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 13th IASA World Congress 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

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Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

13th IASA World Congress 2027

Feb 17–19, 2027Mérida, MexicoIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
History and Archaeology of the Human Senses and Sensual Experience · Cultural Studies and Analyses of Embodiment and the Senses in the Contemporary Americas · Power Relations and the Sensorial and Sensual · Embodiment and Performance in Their Multitude of Forms and Meanings · The Senses in Food, Music, Visual Arts, and Film and Media Studies · Literary, Artistic, Cultural and Popular Representations of the Body and Sensuality · The Politics of the Senses and Sensuality · The Senses of Embodiment in Past and Contemporary Americas

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Mexico

Host nation, providing cultural context and regional perspectives.

Role in topic

United States

Significant participant due to academic and research contributions.

Role in topic

Canada

Active participant, often bridging North American and global viewpoints.

Role in topic

CAN often plays a role in international forums by offering perspectives that can bridge those of the USA and other global regions, contributing to a balanced and comprehensive dialogue.

United Kingdom

Historical academic influence and diverse research contributions.

Role in topic

France

Contributor to intellectual discourse and cultural perspectives.

Role in topic

FRA typically contributes to international intellectual discourse with unique cultural and philosophical perspectives, enriching discussions and offering alternative viewpoints on global challenges.