Conference:
Welcoming Strangers

April 27 2012 to April 27 2012

Venue: Royal Holloway, Egham Campus

Keynote speakers:

Professor Robin Cohen (Emeritus Professor and Former Director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme-funded Oxford Diasporas Programme)

'Before the Welcoming: The Origins of Difference, the Beginnings of Convergence'

Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (RMIT University, Melbourne, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Centre for World Cinema at the University of Leeds)

'The Dorothy Complex: Children and Migration in World Cinema'. 

For programme details and online registration

With accelerated inter- and intra-national mobility, the concepts of place and displacement, and their impact on individual and collective identities, have received unprecedented scholarly attention in disciplines as diverse as Geography, Politics, Music, Film and Media Studies, English, Postcolonial Studies and Migration and Diaspora Studies. The growing importance of multi-locality, transnational (and 'post-national') communities, cosmopolitanism and various forms of flexible citizenship call binarisms which posit ‘the stranger’ as ‘the Other’ of the indigenous community, as the ‘guest’ who is welcomed by the hegemonic host society, into question. Contests around notions of ethnic essentialism and cultural purity have given way to a widespread acceptance of diversity and the celebration of hybridity. In music, literature, and film, the contributions of artists with transnationally mobile and/or ethnic minority backgrounds to the aesthetic traditions of western hegemonic cultural productions have resulted in innovative creative synergies of the local and the global and have enjoyed considerable cross-over appeal. On the other hand, many ‘strangers’ have not been welcomed, their voices have been silenced, and their artistic expressions have been marginalized. The exponential growth in informational technologies and the mobility of global capital, which once promised to fulfil McLuhan’s vision of a global village, has been accompanied by many unforeseen challenges. Restricted mobility of labour, asylum legislation, and new security challenges pose a threat to the ideal of global identities and a cosmopolitan society.

This international, interdisciplinary postgraduate conference is part of the HARC Fellowship 'Welcoming Strangers' Professor Daniela Berghahn has been awarded during the academic year 2011-12. 

For programme details and online registration

For details on how to get to Royal Holloway, University of London