CFP: Memory and Borders: Examining Nationalism and Identity Through Material Culture – Deadline 15 December

Call For Participants:

Memory and Borders: Examining Nationalism and Identity Through Material Culture

Borders, their effect and their history, have become a recurring theme of global politics today; Brexit and the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, diplomatic negotiations between North and South Korea and the history of the Berlin wall are examples of stories that have occupied discourse on the concept of borders. While nations may be a modern geopolitical category, their physical demarcations have had significant influence on the formation of memory and identity. Thus, to what extent are our shared or individual memories shaped or limited by borders? How do geopolitical boundaries influence a sense of national identity? What is the legacy of a national ‘border’?

This is a call for participants to engage in a workshop discussing memory and borders. Its purpose is to encourage cross-disciplinary discourse on the theme of memory and borders. Students, academics, designers, artists, philosophers, writers, journalists, filmmakers, thinkers and creators will come together to foster a conversation concerning the idea of the ‘border’ as a material or ideological barrier or impasse and the impact that these borders have on individual and collective memory. We will discuss ideas around the theme of “Memory and Borders” through material cultures, in a discursive format that includes work and research (-in progress) presentations, and round-table discussions. Abstracts of work, and work in progress can be based on, but not limited to, the following themes:

  • National identity and memory
  • Conflict and memory
  • Violence and trauma in memory
  • Material culture and memory
  • Materiality of borders
  • Nationalism, fracture, independence, identity and divisions through objects
  • Gerrymandering and democracy

Please send a (maximum) 150-word abstract to memoryandborders@gmail.com by 17:00 on December 15, 2018.

This event will be held on February 11, 2019 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Participants that will be selected to present will be compensated for travel (from within London).

This event will be made possible with the generous help of the Design History Society Outreach & Events Grant.

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Call for Papers: Birkbeck Insitute ‘Space, Identities and Memory’, deadline 11 March 2016

Space, Identities and Memory: Call for Papers

We invite postgraduate researchers, academics, activists, artists, and practitioners from across disciplines to contribute to the Birkbeck Institutes’ (BIH/BISR) annual two-day conference held from the 13th to the 14th May 2016.

This year’s conference theme seeks to examine the interplay between identity, space and memory, exploring the ways in which identities may be created, formed and informed by spatial and temporal contexts. In particular, we seek to examine to what extent identities are performed in response to political, social and cultural pressures, including historical circumstances leading to the construction of acceptable and unacceptable identities.

The conference aims to capture the complex overlaying of identities in time and space, and the agency of individuals and communities as they address their own complex understandings of the temporality of identity. Conversely, we hope the conference will highlight how space and time are influenced and shaped by everyday life, sociabilities, mobilisations and processes of subjectivation. In particular, we are seeking papers that engage with topics such as:

  • The built environment: how are housing, architecture, urbanity and concepts of public and private space harnessed in the self-fashioning of individual and communal identity?
  • Gender, sexuality and race, the politics of becoming and the deterritorialisation of the body;
  • ’Home’, domesticity and concepts of solitude and isolation across time and space;
  • Spaces of dissent and resistance: how is memory imbricated in public spaces as sites of encounters, direct action and creative practices?
  • Displacements and borders: constructing or disassembling boundaries from local to global;
  • Explorations in the use of maps, social cartography and critical geography;
  • Exclusion and inclusion in institutional spaces: how have institutionalised spaces cemented or challenged contemporary and past perspectives on identity?
  • Narrating the past: memorialisation, contestation and re-enactment
  • Innovative methods and approaches in the investigation of the intersections between space, identity and memory

Our first confirmed keynote speaker is Andy Merrifield. The conference will conclude with a round table bringing together activists, practitioners and academics.

 

This is an interdisciplinary conference, designed to foster creative thinking and new research agendas. To this end, we encourage papers from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds that explore the interconnections of space, identity and memory.

We are particularly interested in receiving contributions from artists and practitioners in education, the heritage sector or related fields to participate in this interdisciplinary conference.

 

Proposals

We warmly welcome abstracts for 20-minute panel papers. Abstracts should be between 200-300 words in length. Please include a short biography with your submission.  The deadline for submission of abstracts is the 11/03/2016. Authors will be notified regarding the acceptance of their paper after submissions have been reviewed and no later than 31/03/2016.

Contact Details

Please send enquiries and proposals to bihbisrconference@gmail.com

For further information please visit the conference website at https://bihbisrconference.wordpress.com/

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