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Call for Papers

"Pluralism, Inclusion and Citizenship"
4th Global Conference
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Salzburg (Austria)
31 October - 2 November 2008

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With this inter- and multi-disciplinary project we seek to
explore the new developments and changes of the idea of
pluralism and their implications for social and political
processes of inclusion and citizenship in contemporary
societies. The project will also assess the larger context
of major world transformations, such as new forms of
migration and the massive movements of people across the
globe, as well as the impact of the multiple dynamics of
globalisation on rootedness and membership (including their
tensions and conflicts) and on a general sense of social
acceptance and recognition. Looking to encourage innovative
trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from
all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to
understand what it means for people, the world over, to be
citizens in rapidly changing national, social and political
landscapes.

In particular papers, workshops and presentations are
invited on any of the following themes:

1. Challenging Old Concepts of Citizen and Alien
- Who is a citizen and who is an alien, a foreigner?
- The new value of political pluralism and cultural
  multiplicity; breaking with homogeneity and sameness
- What is the place of difference and alterity in defining
  membership and citizenship?
- How to account for political membership and identity?
- Making sense of transformations and their effects over
  citizenship identity and membership
- Othering, marginalising, excluding, stygmatising

2. Nations, Fluid Boundaries and Citizenship
- What does it mean, today, to belong to a nation?
- New migrants, new migratory flows and massive movements
  from peripheral to central countries
- Resurgence of the local and the diminishing importance of
  the national
- Are we living post-national realities?
- What is the place of economic and cultural claims in
  today’s forms of political membership?
- Assimilation, integration, adaptation and other forms of
  placing the responsibility of change on migrants

3. Institutions, Organizations and Social Movements
- Evaluating the promises and institutions of post-national
  governing
- What happened to the rights of migrants and displaced
  peoples?
- Political battles over globalization and the forging of
  global citizenship
- Social movements, new rebellion and alternative global
  politics
- Trans-national connections that escape institutional and
  political control
- New forms of global exclusion

4. Persons, Personhood and the Inter-Personal
- De-nationalising citizenship and the making of a global
  citizen
- Tensions, contradictions and conflicts of citizenship
  formations and political membership
- New sources and forms of political participation; new
  localism, parochialism and communitarianism
- Bonds of care across boundaries of inequality and
  exclusion, ideologies and religions, politics and power,
  nations and geography
- Thinking and acting with foreigners and migrants in mind
- Citizens acknowledging the fundamental role of migrants;
  making migration personal and interpersonal

5. Media and Artistic Representations
- The role of new and old media in the construction of
  political membership, of nations and citizens
- Production and reproduction of political and citizen
  typing and stereotyping
- The contested space of representing politics, national
  identity and membership
- Art, media and how to challenge the rigid and impenetrable
  constructions of political culture
- Living, being and exercising membership through art
- Political life imitating art and fiction

6. Transnational Political Interlacing of Contemporary Life
- What is shared from political cultures? How are political
  cultures shared? Who has access to the sharing of
  political cultures?
- Human rights, migration and massive displacements of
  people
- Living in a context with the political markers of a
  different context: Is that political trans-culturalism?
- Languages, idioms and new emerging forms of wanting to
  bridge the ‘invisible’ divide between political cultures
- Symbols and significations that connect people to places
  other than ‘their own’
- Politics, identity and belonging by choice

7. New Concepts, New Forms of Inclusion
- Recognition and respect without marginality
- An ethics for social and political relations in a new
  millennium
- What to do with historically old concepts like tolerance,
  acceptance and hospitality?
- Should not we all be strangers? Should not we all be
  foreigners?
- Is there any use for cosmopolitanism these days?
- Embracing the alien within the citizen; building fluid
  boundaries of membership and political participation

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word
abstracts should be submitted by Friday 13th June 2008. If
your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference,
an 8 page draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th
October 2008.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to
both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word,
WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information
and in this order:
a) author(s),
b) affiliation,
c) email address,
d) title of abstract,
e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from
using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or
emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We
acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals
submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week
you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might
be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an
alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Director of Research,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
E-Mail: [email protected]

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
Email: [email protected]

The conference is part of the ‘Diversity and Recognition’
research projects, which in turn belong to the ‘At the
Interface’ programmes of ID.Net. We aim to bring together
people from different areas and interests to share ideas and
explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual
and academic exploration. All papers accepted for and
presented at this conference are eligible for publication in
an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for
publication in a themed hard copy volume.

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/diversity/pluralism/pluralism.htm

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/diversity/pluralism/pl4/cfp.html

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