Conference Announcement

"Imagining Diasporas: Space, Identity and Social Change"
Interdisciplinary Conference
Centre for Studies in Social Justice and the Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences, University of Windsor
Windsor, Ont. (Canada)
14.-16.5.2004


Confirmed Speakers:

Brian Keith Axel “Diasporic Sublime”
Robin Cohen “The Uses of ‘Diaspora’”
Nina Glick-Schiller “Biologies of Belonging: Blood, Diasporic Longing,
Long-Distance Nationalism, and the World Beyond”
Michael Gomez “Dilemmas of Identity in Diaspora”
Judith Sinanga Ohlmann “La diaspora rwandaise: où ‘l’origine’ perd son sens”
William Safran “Diaspora: Disconnection, Hyphenation, Reconstruction”


Themes:

Diasporas:

How are diasporas imagined? How is belongingness negotiated vis-à-vis host
countries and overlapping diasporas? What is a diaspora in an age of global
demographic shifts? How do diasporas differ from ethnic groups, minorities,
and multicultural communities? How are diasporas conceptualized?

Space:

How do diasporas relate to spaces left, lost, forfeited, imagined, gained,
and/or experienced? How does space create, reinvent and/or erode diasporic
identity and culture?

Identity:

How do we define diasporic identities in the 21st century? Who does the
defining? How do processes of remembering and forgetting shape these
identities? What role does culture play in preserving, maintaining and/or
developing individual identities?

Social Change and Social Justice:

How do diasporas relate to processes of oppression, resistance, subversion,
and globalization? How do issues of social injustice play out in the creation,
maintenance and aspirations of diasporic identities and cultures? To what
extent do visions of a just future fuel diasporic identities?

Diasporic Cultures:

What are diasporic cultures? How do they relate to other cultures? What
function do they play in the preservation, disappearance and promotion of
diasporic communities? How do they change, and why? How do they relate to
other diasporic cultures? In a globalized world, where do diasporic cultures
end and “mainstream” cultures begin?

Pedagogizing Diaspora Studies:

What is it? Who does it? What is taught, to whom and why? How do space and
identity affect its delivery? How do Diaspora Studies link to and differ from
other sub-disciplines (minority studies, ethnic studies, multicultural
studies, etc.)?


Conference Website:
http://cronus.uwindsor.ca/diasporas


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