BELONGING AND ETHNICITY RESEARCH GROUP, BANGOR UNIVERSITY, WALES, UK

International Conference: Intersectionality and the Spaces of Belonging

28-29 June 2012

Bangor University, UK

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Nira Yuval-Davis, Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK
http://www.uel.ac.uk/lss/staff/nirayuval-davis/ 
Nira Yuval-Davis will speak on the subject of her recent book, The Politics of Belonging. Intersectional Contestations.

Prof. Jie-Hyun Lim, Director of the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea/ Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
http://www.rich.ac/eng/institute/lim.php 
Jie-Hyun Lim will speak on his current research project, ‘A transnational history of victimhood nationalism: national mourning and global accountability’.

Dr Gurminder K. Bhambra, Director of the Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick, UK
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academicstaff/bhambra/gurminderkbhambra/
Gurminder K. Bhambra will speak on her current research on early African-American sociologists and their conceptions of identity, inequality, and social theory.

Overview:

Current debates on gender, nation, sexuality, religion and other categories of social divisions and belonging often address the relations between these categories with the term ‘intersectionality’: intersecting in an infinite variety of ways, each of these categories helps construct all the others. What we are, what we suffer, what we belong to, or what we long to be, is multifaceted and contradictory. Our longings, or aversions, are related to our belongings in but complicated and ambiguous ways, and what social group or category we belong to does not determine our political or cultural values, goals or dreams. And yet: the former inform the latter, if only to the extent that we do not wish to remain tomorrow what we are today. Nor do our positionings, situatedness and belongings simply add up to an ‘identity’ (a being so and not other) – as if my hold of ‘ethnicity no. 7’ plus ‘gender no. 2’ plus ‘citizenship in state no. 11’ etcetera could ever equate to exactly what ‘I am’: ‘citizenship in state no. 11’ does not mean the same depending on whether I am of this or that sex, or sexuality, or age, or ethnicity. These intersections complicate, perhaps thwart, any efforts to ground the cultural and political projects, coalitions, emancipation that we long for in the spaces (physical, virtual, rhetorical) we belong to.

The organisers welcome critical contributions on all aspects of ‘spaces of belonging’ under the perspective of the concept of intersectionality. Theoretically informed contributions from scholars in all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, broadly conceived, are invited, as well as from social and community activists or artists.

Key themes of interest to the conference include, but are in no way limited to:

• Citizenship, cultural and state membership
• Nation, race, ethnicity, nationality
• Indigeneity
• Diasporas
• Religion
• Cosmopolitanism and human rights
• Longing and the non-space of utopia
• Majority-minority relations
• Class and belonging
• Sex, gender and sexuality
• Standpoints, dialogues and politics of recognition
• Virtual spaces of belonging
• Belonging, feeling, intimacy
• Belonging and equality
• Age-spaces and ability-spaces

Abstract Submission:

Please submit, by January 22nd 2012, a proposal of between 300-500 words, including title and references, prepared for blind review, alongside a brief biographical note (max. 100 words), in separate electronic files to berg@bangor.ac.uk

Contacts for questions:

Prof. Howard Davis h.h.davis@bangor.ac.uk
Dr. Sally Baker s.baker@bangor.ac.uk
Dr. Marcel Stoetzler m.stoetzler@bangor.ac.uk
Dr. Robin Mann r.mann@bangor.ac.uk

A conference website containing programme and registration details will be launched in January 2012.

The conference is sponsored by the Belonging and Ethnicity Research Group (BERG), the Bangor University School of Social Sciences and the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research Data and Methods (WISERD).