Convenors: Dunja Fehimovic and Rebecca Ogden. You can read all about this event by clicking here.

Registration closes on 30 March. Please click here to register.

This event will take place in Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, Sidgwick Site, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT, UK.

Branding is the deliberate projection of a consciously-constructed image or identity, the marketing of the self to the other, the selling of specificity. The emergence of nation branding as a concept in the mid-1990s (Simon Anholt, 1996) corresponds with an attempt to reassert control over the perception and production of the nation, carving out a niche in which a supposed specificity will protect the nation from being subsumed by the amorphous forces of globalization, as well as allowing it to compete in the international neoliberal marketplace. Competitive nation branding can thus be seen as both a part of and response to the processes of globalisation variously theorised by Arjun Appadurai, Néstor García Canclini and Walter Mignolo, amongst others.The branding of a nation involves an ongoing struggle over economic, political, cultural and affective capital between multiple parties, from both inside and outside the nation. Scholarly work on the topic of branding has typically focussed on issues relating to marketing and PR, but this conference seeks to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to interrogate the aims, functioning, effects of and resistance to branding in Latin America.