PRACTICES OF TRANSFORMATION: THE ORGANISED CULTURAL ENCOUNTER
27- 28 October 2016
Venue: Roskilde University, Department of Communication and Arts
Roskilde, Denmark
Organised cultural encounters (OCEs) are activities that through particular intervention strategies aim at creating transformation. They may be cultural exchange programmes, reconciliation projects, community cohesion initiatives, interfaith dialogue meetings or various projects related to integration of immigrants. These interventions are organised around differences considered to be identity formative and divisive, in particular ethnicity, religion, nationality or ‘culture’, sometimes also including other socio-cultural categories that are seen as intersecting axes of differentiation or diversity (gender, sexual orientation, class, age, (dis)ability). Setting up these kinds of encounters is a widespread practice that aims at facilitating for instance integration, tolerance and community cohesion in the context of culturally diverse societies. Thus, OCEs are invested with much hope for transformation not only of the attendees, but also in the society, societies or contexts addressed by the encounter. Organisers (implicit or explicit) lean on assumptions concerning the nature of differences, encounters and social change.
The conference is interdisciplinary and we invite papers that critically examine these assumptions and practices through the study of particular kinds of OCEs, their arenas and methods. Theoretical as well as empirical papers are welcome. While other themes are welcome, we in particular invite papers within the following themes:
- Transformative methods in OCEs (narratives, art, exhibition, ritual, travel)
- Producing and/or managing (cultural) differences
- Staging and scripting cultural encounters
- Performativities of cultural encounters
- Bodies and affects related to cultural encounters
- Intersecting access of differentiation
- Research methodologies of OCEs
- Genealogies of OCEs
- Activism and research: when practitioners of OCEs are also researchers of OCEs
- The spatio-temporality of OCEs
- OCEs and global power dynamics
Keynotes by:
Professor Sarah Pink, RMIT University, Melbourne
Professor Gill Valentine, The University of Sheffield
Professor Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa
Professor Emma Renolds, Cardiff University
SUBMISSION OF PAPER PROPOSAL AND PRACTICAL INFORMATION
If you are interested in participating in the conference, please send an abstract (no more than 250 words) and a short biography (no more than 100 words) by 2 May to Helle Bach Riis (hriis@ruc.dk<mailto:hriis@ruc.dk>) and Lise Paulsen Galal (galal@ruc.dk<mailto:galal@ruc.dk>). Successful applicants will be notified by 3 June, 2016.
