CFP - Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities conference (3-5 Dec 2007; Flinders U, SA)

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.

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:

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

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

3. 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@flinders.edu.au by 31 March 2007.

All abstracts will be refereed. Further information may be obtained from the Flinders Humanities Research Centre for Cultural Heritage and Cultural Exchange website.

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).

CONFERENCE CONTACT
Nena Bierbaum, School of Humanities, Flinders University, SA.
Ph: (+61 8) 82012578 or 82012257
Fax: (+61 8) 82013635