[ecrea] CFP: Conference Migration, Memory, and Place

*CALL FOR PAPERS*


*Migration, Memory, and Place*


*Conference organized by Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies 
<http://memory.au.dk/>*

*& Network for Migration and Culture 
<http://migrationandculture.ku.dk/call/>*


*6 – 7 December 2012*


Venues:

University of Copenhagen (6 December)

Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj (7 December)


The increasingly complex relationship between the local and the global, 
‘the near’ and ‘the far away’, has emerged as one of the defining 
characteristics of contemporary societies. With globalization’s 
increased mobility of people and speed of information exchange, and the 
cultural encounters resulting from it, traditional essentializing and 
stabilizing definitions of terms such as ‘home’, ‘belonging’, ‘place’, 
‘identity’ and ‘memory’ have long become problematic and more adequate 
understandings of these conceptions are much sought after.

This conference centers on the recognition that place and space are of 
fundamental importance to all questions of migration, and that cultural 
migrations may involve a fundamental transformation of the experience of 
spaces and places and their close links to the social and cultural 
meanings of home, belonging and memory. Through the movement of people, 
cities, homes, landscapes and other localities become re-configured and 
reinterpreted through migrants’ stories, photographs, music, artwork, 
films and websites. Most urban spaces, for instance, are already 
described as inseparably diasporic, migratory spaces. At the same time, 
places are palimpsests that hold many layers of memory whose 
significance is negotiated in contemporary cultural life.

The conference invites considerations of how artistic and cultural 
representations of memory, migration and migrant experiences (in 
literature, cinema, theatre, media, the visual arts and other areas of 
culture and cultural practices) provide fruitful points of departure for 
the development of new theoretical concepts of place and belonging, and, 
vice versa, how multiple approaches to the perspective of place and 
memory can enrich the study of cultural migration.

The conference invites papers from scholars working with art, 
literature, film, media, cultural representations or cultural 
performance and cutting across fields such as studies in culture, media 
and the arts, migration studies, cross-cultural studies, post-colonial 
studies, cultural geography, place theory, cultural anthropology, urban 
studies, cultural sociology and philosophy.

*
*

*Confirmed keynotes*

_Edward S. Casey <http://edwardscasey.com/>_, Distinguished Professor of 
Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook: tba

_Andreas Huyssen <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/theatrephd/huyssen.html>_, 
Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia 
University: “Media of Memory”

_Nikos Papastergiadis 
<http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/about/people/academic/nikos-papastergiadis>_, 
Professor of Cultural Studies and Media & Communications, University of 
Melbourne: “The Scenes of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”

_Alistair Thomson 
<http://arts.monash.edu.au/history/staff/athomson.php>_, Professor of 
History, Monash University: tba

_Sigrid Weigel 
<http://www.zfl-berlin.org/personenliste-detail/items/weigel.html>_, 
Professor of Comparative Literature, Zentrum für Literaturforschung and 
Technische Universität, Berlin: “The Mediterranean from the perspective 
of the Black Sea: Topography and cultural semantics of land and sea in 
the European thalassic debate”


The conference invites papers on the following topics of reflection and 
discussion:

   *

     Critical reflections on narrations and hi/stories of rootedness
     versus migratory hi/stories of place (including migration and the
     relation to national constructions of place, identity and
     intersubjective recognition).

   *

     Migration and diasporas as influencing collective memories,
     cultural memory and memory cultures, e.g. as challenging or being
     challenged by collective memories of place; and how places may be
     “re-membered” through migration/ immigration.

   *

     Critical reflections on existing theoretical discourses of, for
     instance, transient places, transcultural places, borders, contact
     zones, transit spaces, non-places and third spaces as produced or
     intensified by migration, the movement through places,
     hybridizations and cultural translations of places.

   *

     Migration as throwing new light on place and belonging as dynamic
     phenomena shaped by transcultural connections and processes of
     “getting back into place”.

   *

     The interfaces of place, locality and belonging as discursive,
     politicized phenomena and/ or as sensed, emotionally experienced
     or recollected phenomena.

   *

     The relations between global migration and local places at
     international and sub-national levels, including the role of
     collective memory between nation and globe, and the new forms of
     identity constructions that arise from this.

   *

     The urban space as contact zone or lived diversity: questions of
     diversity, intersubjective relations, ghettoization, gentrification.

   *

     Representations of displacement, rootlessness, homelessness or
     re-integration in new places as throwing new light on human
     relations to place and notions of home and belonging (including
     migrant domesticity: the role of domestic spaces in migrant’s
     experience of belonging).


Applicants should send an abstract of 200-300 words clearly outlining 
the focus of the paper, alongside a short biography, to (_nmc /at/ hum.ku.dk) 
<mailto:(nmc /at/ hum.ku.dk)>_. Paper presentations will be scheduled to 30 
minutes (including discussion).


*Deadline for proposals: 1 May 2012*

You will be notified of the organisers’ decision by early June 2012.


_Conference contacts: _

Sten Pultz Moslund, Post-doc, Dept of Literature, Culture and Media, 
University of Southern Denmark ((_pultz /at/ litcul.sdu.dk) 
<mailto:(pultz /at/ litcul.sdu.dk)>_ )

Anne Ring Petersen, Associate Professor, Dept of Arts and Cultural 
Studies, University of Copenhagen ((_annering /at/ hum.ku.dk) 
<mailto:(annering /at/ hum.ku.dk)>_ )

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Associate Professsor, Dept of Aesthetics and 
Communication, Aarhus University ((_memory /at/ au.dk) <mailto:(memory /at/ au.dk)>_)