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Call for Papers Theme: Identity Politics and Intercultural Dialogues Type: 8th International Symposium Institution: International Network for Alternative Academia Location: Barcelona (Spain) Date: 21.–23.11.2016 Deadline: 17.10.2016 __________________________________________________ This trans-disciplinary research project is interested in identifying the conflicting social forces and political realities of identity and cultural diversity experiences, of the processes of identity formation and of the dynamics of recognition in diverse societal, cultural and political contexts. It has become a common place to speak about globalization as a process that has made the world smaller and more interconnected. But beneath such claims multiple processes remain analytically undefined and critically unexplored. Identity claims and social identity formations have become more prevalent, fluid and less fixed throughout societies. People in their local, regional, national and even international contexts are systematically making claims about group identities, which have consequences for politics, social relations and a cultural sense of belonging. We are interested in assessing both of these trends and their contradictory existence: how ideas of culture and cultural interactions shape identity, membership, place, rootedness and belonging while simultaneously encouraging misunderstanding, tension and conflict, estrangement, isolation and alienation. The project will investigate world transformations that have structured cultural flows, given rise to new forms of hybridity, increased nomadic lives and encouraged the proliferation of transitory and transversal interconnections. What are the lessons to be learned from these complex processes and the considerations to be had for envisioning and contributing to a future politics of recognition? We invite colleagues from all disciplines and professions interested in exploring and explaining these issues in a collective, deliberative and dialogical environment to send presentation proposals which address these general questions or the following themes: 1. Reconfigurations of Culture - What new conceptions of culture are emerging? - How can we account for the emergence of new and contemporary conceptions of culture? What kind of processes can explain why culture is seen today as multiple, polyvalent and even internally contradictory? - How are contemporary conceptions of culture remaking conceptions of self and other, recasting our understanding of our links, bonds and relations, requiring us to rethink antinomies and antagonisms? - How can we transform the binary perversions and contradictory forces of culture: diversity versus homogeneity, multiplicity versus sameness, alterity versus normality, recognition versus misrecognition? - The textures of cultures in contemporary landscapes seem at one and the same time fixed and fluid, porous and hermetic, rigid and flexible, liquid and solid. How are these divisions to be explained? What factors hold them in play? - How can we rethink the concept of culture, such that it overcomes its conceptual and historical limits? - Do we really need the concept of culture? What does this concept help to reveal? What does the concept shroud? 2. Contemporary Identity Formations - What are the new identities that are emerging? - Are these new identities more fluid or less fluid than other formations? - Are these new identities establishing different forms of relation to the nation state or recognizing new social contexts for identification and anchoring? - How do these new identity formations relate to other more established identities or to state sanctioned identities? - Is there an inter-identity formation politics that needs to be accounted for? - How are these new identities talking back? In what ways are they unsettling and/or supporting the current system of state-centered, nation-centered sanctioned recognition? - Are these new emerging identities questioning old formations; if so, how? - What means both social and political are being used to contest the non-recognition of identities, old, new and emerging? - What avenues – state-centered or otherwise – are being sought to secure recognition? - Is there a new politics of recognition that is not based on identity claims? 3. Peoples, Places and Boundaries - With the push towards the dislocation and decoupling of culture and nation, of culture and place, of culture and history, how are new solidarities, new ethnicities, new identities, new nations and new places of belonging taking shape? - What effects have massive migratory flows had on a politics of inclusion and on territorial forms of belonging? - As we witness the dismantling and de-mythologizing culture’s prominent place in nationally bound identities and histories, what is being offered to fill in the gap? If we are witnessing the death of national culture, what is being born to take its place? - What does it mean, today, to be part of a culture and to be part of multiple cultures? Why does it matter? - How are new forms of global migration influencing the development of hybridity, helping to reconcile cultural difference and cultural diversity? - How are migrants accommodating to conditions of discrimination and marginality they face in host territories? - How are migrants organizing politically and claiming their rights and place within host nations? - What kind of battles over borders and frontiers are we witnessing? What are these conflicts and struggles doing to our notions of borders and frontiers? - What are the political, social and ethical problems with the politics of imposing ‘culture’ onto others? Whose rights and responsibilities need to be addressed? How are these issues being resolved in practice via policies of assimilation, integration, adaptation? 4. Territory, Home and Rooted-ness - How are borders and frontiers being re-deployed today? Are they under a re-conceptualization? How are these impacting old and new identity formations? - How are belonging and inclusion being redefined both within and outside nationalistic discourses? - How do tensions, contradictions and conflicts in and between cultures influence identity formation and structure social membership? - What new conceptions of belonging and its link to territory, home and roots can be developed to better accommodate diversity and otherness? - What new sources and forms of belonging do we see emerging from the re-definition of culture? What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of new forms of tribalism, localism, parochialism and communitarianism? - How do we generate concepts of belonging that are more fluid and in sync to the current conditions of mobility, migration and diversity? - How do we give collective credence and legitimacy to multiplicity and emphasize bonds rather than place as a more fluid yet stable sense of belonging? - How might inclusive categories of hospitality and cosmopolitanism have political and cultural transformative value? 5. Art, Contestation & Aesthetic Critique - In what ways is art being employed as a means for redefining and reconfiguring identity at both the personal and societal level? - What is the role of the media in the construction of cultures and identities? - How much do these aesthetic experiences seep into the fabric of social life? - What are the means of production and reproduction by which cultural recognition and misrecognition develop? - How can we explore the productive effect of art on forms of identity construction? How is art and art expression responding to the need to redefine identity? - How should the contested space of representing meaning and identity be negotiated? - How can art media challenge the rigid and impenetrable constructions of culture? How can it perpetuate such ideals of culture? - How might art serve as a model in the creation of new ways of experiencing self and otherness, of understanding identity formation processes? - How does art foster cultural membership? How can it be employed in reconfiguring and reshaping such identifications? - Culture may be seen as fiction and fiction as culture. Given this is the case; is there the possibility for the truth in/of art? - How can we participate and foster processes of critical and creative aesthetic innovation for identity perception and agency; for cultural change? - Is their a space for playfulness and joy that can come our way by the exercise of art for the insertion of instability in identity formations; in the redefinition of culture and cultural forms? 6. Interlacing of Identities and Cultures in Contemporary Life - How are cultures defined and redefined? Who participates in the social and political task of defining and redefining culture? - What is shared within cultures? How are cultures shared? Who has access to the sharing of cultures? - How can more fluid and less rigid perceptions of social and cultural forms of identity be constructed? - What conception of responsibility must be developed to accompany the creation of new models of political agency for identity and cultural formations? - Who destroys culture? What processes and procedures are utilized in this process? - How are symbols and significations used to connect people to cultures other than ‘their own’? What are the strengths of such attempts at unification? What are the weaknesses? - How might we create new horizons in political, cultural and social relations between migrants and natives, host and guests, self and other, center and periphery, privilege and marginality? - How is culture shaped by ideals of destiny, happenstance, choice and politics in this process? - Culture appears to be an infinite source for the production of contradictory signification and meaning. How is it employed for the construction of identity and membership? How is it employed as a means for exclusion? - How can we instill a sense of co-responsibility and accountability in societies and cultures alike? 7. Battle Grounds? The Politics of Culture and Identity - How has culture and identity been transformed into a battle ground for politics and the political; to what affect? - Political battles over the principles and core values of a culture, the center pieces of identity or over those principles that exist in and across cultures and identities pose challenges for government agencies and social groups. How are these battles being framed discursively? How are they being resolved in practice? What kind of political consequences do they have? - The dynamics of cultural recognition and misrecognition preoccupy government agencies and social movements. How can we best explain and conceptualize these social and political processes? - What is the place of identity and cultural claims in today’s forms of social and political membership, in these formation processes? - How are trans-cultural connections that escape institutional and political control formed? How viable and stable are the bonds forged in this manner? - When identity and cultural practices conflict with human rights claims, how are cultural heritage and political responsibility being balanced? How should they be balanced? - How should we be face abuses of cultural and identity claims? What are the legal, juridical and ethical arguments that need to be raised against these abuses? 8. New Bonds for Self & Other: Identities & Inter-Subjectivities, Cultures & Inter-Cultures? - Are we witnessing the fragmentation or the ever more stringent amalgamation of the self with other selves; of the recognition of the place of Other in the formation of Self? - How is the de-centering of the Self influencing our understanding of the Other, recasting the bonds between us, and reshaping the contours of our relationships? - Is non-recognition a form of cultural violence? How do we frame an ethics in an age of disrespect and entitlement? - As identities are socially constructed, performatively enacted and re-made, how are societies and cultures acknowledging these processes? What are the political consequences of recognizing the intertwining of self and other? - Can the self be defined outside its binds to the other? How can we account for a selfhood that lives under the fantasy of being unlinked from other? - How do silence, the adoption of subaltern positions and strategic subordinations affect identity formations? How do they affect perceptions of identity? What kind of cultural distortions might they produce? - How are new forms of communication impacting the emergence of identities? What is the impact of social networks, video games and online communities on the display, performance and construction of identities? Do these have a place within culture and cultural formations? - Who am I if not in relation with others? How does relationality inform identity and culture? - Must the self/other relationship be conceived in terms of hostility? What new models might allow for a redefinition of the bond as vital dependency and interlaced identity and cultural formations? - How are bonds of care established across boundaries of inequality and exclusion, ideologies and religions, politics and power, nations and geography? - How are people, groups and organizations contributing to an ethics of social relations that embeds Self in Other and vice versa? What can we learn from these experiences? 9. Crossing Boundaries of Identity and Culture - How are cultural and identity boundaries subject to interpenetration, overlapping, crossovers, interlacing, hybridization and interdependence; to what affect? - How are emerging languages, idioms and images bridging the ‘invisible’ divide of cultures and identities? - How is recognition and respect across cultures and identities fostered? How is it undermined? - Can we revamp historical concepts such as tolerance, acceptance and hospitality to mesh with contemporary conceptions of cultural and identity divide? - How is the concept of time employed in the reinterpretation of culture and identity? What is the role of nostalgia, memory and forgetting in the merging and emergence of new cultures and new identities? - How might we develop an ethics for cultural relations and identity formations? If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract as soon as possible and no later than Monday, 17th of October, 2016. (For justifiable cases, we do uphold a tolerance period of eight days.) Please use the following template for your submission: First: Author(s); Second: Affiliation, if any; Third: Email Address; Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal; Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract. To submit an abstract online follow these steps: 1) Go to our webpage: www.alternative-academia.net 2) Select your Symposium of choice within the list of annual events (listed by period and city) 3) Go to LOG IN at the top of the page 4) Create a User Name and Password for our system and log in 5) Click on the Call for Papers for the Symposium 6) Go to the end of the Call for Papers page and click on the First Step of Submission Process button 7) Follow the instructions provided for completing the abstract submission process For every abstract proposal submitted, we acknowledge receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us within three days, you should assume the submission process was not completed successfully. Please try again or contact our technical support for clarifications. All presentation and paper proposals that address these questions and issues will be fully considered and evaluated. Evaluation of abstract submissions will be ongoing, from the opening date of Monday 7th of December, 2015. All Prospective Delegates can expect a reply time to their submission of three weeks. Accepted abstracts will require a full draft paper by Monday 7th of November, 2016. Papers are for a 20 minute presentation, 8 to 10 pages long, double spaced, Times New Roman 12. All papers presented at the symposium are eligible for publication as part of a digital or paperback book. Venue: Betahaus BCN Carrer de Vilafranca #7, Gràcia 08024 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain Symposium Coordinators: Albin Wagener Doyen Faculté des Humanités Université Catholique de l'Ouest Angers, France Email: [email protected] Alejandro Cervantes-Carson General Coordinator International Network for Alternative Academia Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain Email: [email protected] Conference website: http://www.alternative-academia.net/ocs-2.3.5/index.php/BCN2016Nov/IPID-8 __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
