Transcultural Mappings

Transcultural mappings: emerging issues in comparative, transnational and area studies

9-11 April 2010, University of Sydney, Australia
www.arts.usyd.edu.au/conferences/transcultural_mappings
tcm.10@usyd.edu.au

Extended deadline 11 December 2009 (submission information below)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Eleonore Kofman
Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship, Head of Research, Department of Social Sciences, & Co-director of Social Policy Research Centre, Middlesex University, London.

Hilary Charlesworth
Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Professor in RegNet, Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, ANU, Canberra.

Françoise Lionnet
Professor of French, Francophone, and Comparative Literatures & Co-director of the Mellon postdoctoral program 'Cultures in Transnational Perspective', UCLA, President of the American Comparative Literature Association.

Ahmad Shboul, AM
Honorary Associate and founding Chair, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Sydney.
SUBMISSION AND OTHER PRACTICAL INFORMATION All submissions (200 word abstracts), for individual papers, panels or posters should be made via the conference website.

Presenters will be notified as soon as possible after the submission deadline whether their proposals are accepted.
If presenters need earlier confirmation to secure funding, or if you have other enquiries, please email us.
Online payment of registration will be enabled in coming weeks.

We have no funding for scholarships, but have tried to keep rates as low as possible and there is a significant discount for students (see website for information on rates).

Accommodation and orientation information will also be posted to the website soon.

We are planning refereed publications from the conference. To have your paper considered for publication, we will need to receive it by 12 March 2010.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF CONFERENCE THEME (more detail on website) The idea of transculturation was coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940, to describe a process of transition from one culture to another. It has come to the fore once again in our globalised and "glocalised" third millenium, where concepts such as international and crosscultural, based on an idea of nations and cultures as relatively stable and clearly delimitable entities, have become, if not obsolete, then inadequate. The ideas of the transnational and transcultural have been put forward in recent years as conceptual frameworks that enable us to develop new interdisciplinary (or indeed transdisciplinary) epistemologies of the global, the local, and the "glocal".
 
Yet, we continue to map the world, sociopolitically and culturally as much as physically. Indeed, physical mappings still largely inform our geopolitical and cultural mappings, through identification of nations and subnational or supranational (and sometimes transnational) regions.
 
What conceptual tools, then, might emerge from an exercise of “transcultural mappings”? Can it represent a possible way through a certain postmodern and postcolonial impasse? What factors might determine how these mappings occur and how they evolve? The term itself is paradoxical: mapping is an exercise in plotting, delimiting, demarcating. The transcultural, like its cousin the transnational, destabilises the certainties of maps, much as Peter has destabilised Mercator. It fuzzes the edges, shifts the foci, changes the shapes.
 
This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore these debates, both theoretically and empirically, and to consider their epistemological and political implications.
Bronwyn Winter & Kiran Grewal, co-convenors tcm.10@usyd.edu.au