Call for contributions: PhD workshop on migration

Call for Contributions

Keynotes: Professor Dr. Stef Craps, University of Ghent, Dr. Kathy Burell, University of Liverpool Venue:

Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Format: The PhD seminar and workshop will include contributions from invited guest speakers on the first day. On the second day PhD students give 15 minute presentations on their own work, with responses and feedback from invited guests. Global mobilities challenge our understandings of personal memory, diasporic memory and the archive. On the one hand, changing patterns of migration, flight and expulsion redistribute recollection along new pathways. On the other hand, changes in technology and communication channels (photography, digital platforms) reconfigure diasporic memory networks. One effect of these changes is greater visibility and attention to transnational and transcultural memory, a greater challenge to nation state interpretations and archives.

In ‘Migration, Memory and the Archive’ we want to explore the varieties of transcultural and transnational memory work, both past and present, as well as the ways in which these processes reconstitute and expand the archive (understood broadly as the institutions and procedures which select and preserve the past). In particular, we want to investigate versions of migrant histories that develop beyond, or in competition with, state-political or institutional formations of the past: the networks and transmission routes of migrant recollection; the reclaiming of the past in local and personal experiences, for example in oral histories; the more recently acknowledged memory resources, such as bodily, emotional or traumatic recollection.

The PhD seminar and workshop examines how literary, historical, philosophical and ethnographic approaches can contribute to the understanding of alternative archival practices and sources. We welcome contributions from across the human sciences on any aspect of transcultural or transnational migrant memory and archives, including historical, literary, museum studies, visual arts, digital and audiovisual media. The topic areas include: - subjective, transcultural and non-state archiving practices - performances and representations of transnational memory - the form and uses of traumatic memories - entangled and multidirectional readings of the pasts - oral histories and narrative strategies of remembering and forgetting - cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan recollections of movement and re-settlement.

Proposals: a 300 word abstract together with a short-bio to Ortner@hum.ku.dk

Deadline: 30 September 2015

Organised by the Comparative Studies in Migration and Memory Research Group, ENGEROM, University of Copenhagen: Jessica Ortner, Postdoctoral Fellow, English, Germanic and Romance Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen. Peter Leese, Associate Professor, English, Germanic and Romance Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.

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