[EDLING:2226] CFP: Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities

[Francis M. Hult]

http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/events/movingcultures.html

Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities: a conference about migration, connection, 
heritage and cultural memory. 

Flinders University
Adelaide, South Australia
3 - 5 December 2007

CALL FOR PAPERS:

This conference will examine issues of migration, transnational connection, 
displacement heritage, global space and cultural memory created by the 
movements of peoples between cultures in the modern world.

In the mass migrations of the last 200 years, millions of people have left 
their homelands and home cultures to settle in new places. Their motives have 
been many: the emigrant’s search for new opportunities, the gastarbeiter’s self-
imposed exile, the refugee’s forced flight and the settler’s quest for trade, 
military advantage or fresh fields and pastures new have all shaped the great 
migrations of the modern period.

Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities will explore the cultural connections 
between homelands and new lands, and the complexities of reshaping cultural 
identities and shifting allegiances between cultures of departure and cultures 
of arrival.  

The conference will have three main streams:

The public policy stream will cover issues of economics, population, forced 
migration, security, ‘core values’, education and the managing of cultural 
impacts of migration. 

The history of migration stream will include sessions on pre- and post-World 
War Two migration, recent arrivals and diasporic communities.

The Cultural Migration stream will include sessions on memory, writing, 
language, cultural maintenance and sustainability, and the plurality of migrant 
identities. 

Conference themes

Papers are invited on the following:

The demographics of people flow: who moves where? and why? 
Forced migration in the Asia Pacific 
Cultural, political and economic factors shaping migration. How are connections 
made? 
Bordering the nation: migration and national security 
Transnationalism, citizenship and sovereignty 
Gender and generational issues in the migration experience 
Linguistics, diaspora and migration 
Settling down, settlement patterns and return migration 
Can multi-cultures and multi-ethnicities produce one nation? 
Multiculturalism 
Language maintenance in the new culture 
Foodways 
Migration, place and situated identities 
Connections with the new place and (re)negotiating with the old 
Home and Away: What is transferred from the home culture to the new culture? 
What cannot fit in the baggage? 
Imaginary homelands: life-writing, creative writing and film responses to the 
migration experience 
Unsettlement: the idea of the settler colony 
Cultural memory: heritage and exchange 
Transplanted cultures as tourist attractions 
Fusion, ‘cultural hybridity’, cosmopolitanism 
 
Guest speakers – The conference will feature plenary session addresses by 
leading international scholars in the field, as well as parallel presentations 
by researchers and policy-makers.

Proposals for panel sessions will be considered as well as abstracts for 
individual papers. Panel proposals should include a theme for the session, the 
names of all speakers, the titles of their papers, and a session summary of 250–
300 words.

Abstracts of 250–300 words should be submitted for each paper, whether they are 
included in a panel session proposal or not. Where abstracts are intended for a 
proposed panel session, this should be indicated on the abstract.

Abstracts and session proposals should be sent to Nena Bierbaum, School of 
Humanities, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australian 5001, 
or by email to nena.bierbaum at flinders.edu.au by 31 March 2007.

All abstracts will be refereed.

Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities is a conference organised by the Flinders 
Humanities Research Centre for Cultural Heritage and Cultural Exchange, the 
Centre for Research into New Literatures in English (CRNLE) and Flinders 
International Asia Pacific (FIAP).