International conference organized by
Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies
& Network for Migration and Culture
5 – 7 December 2012
Venues:
University of Copenhagen (5-6 December)
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj (7 December)
See papers from the conference
See conference website for general information and program
CFP:
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, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook: tba
Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University: “Shadowplays and Memory Politics: A New Aesthetic Medium”
Nikos Papastergiadis, Professor of Cultural Studies and Media & Communications, University of Melbourne: “The Scenes of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”
Alistair Thomson, Professor of History, Monash University: "Missing Pieces, Moving Stories: Interpreting Migrant Women's Lives Across Letters, Photos and Memories"
Sigrid Weigel, Professor of Comparative Literature, Zentrum für Literaturforschung und 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”
80+ papers on the following topics of reflection and discussion will be presented at the conference:
For further information on the conference and the networks, see our websites:
migrationandculture.ku.dk
http://memory.au.dk/
Conference contacts:
Sten Pultz Moslund, Post-doc, Dept of Literature, Culture and Media, University of Southern Denmark (pultz@litcul.sdu.dk)
Anne Ring Petersen, Associate Professor, Dept of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen (annering@hum.ku.dk)
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Associate Professsor, Dept of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University (memory@au.dk)