Intersecting Belongings: Cultural Conviviality and Cosmopolitan Futures

Contemporary challenges and contexts of the local, regional, national and global raise urgent questions about cultural conviviality and cosmopolitan futures across the world. These are times when trans-cultural, trans-national and multicultural belonging are particularly being tested through environmental catastrophe, economic volatility, parochialism, fundamentalism, notions of cosmopolitan and multicultural exhaustion, and war. A key challenge lies in the paradox of culture, in which belonging has become a fundamental question of preservation, atavism, tradition and survival as well as hybridity, transgression, possibility and transformation. The aim of this conference theme is to respond to this paradoxical challenge by opening up discussion, critical reflection and analysis about emerging social and cultural identities that are formed at the intersection of multiple and multi-sited belongings.

We hope that the conference theme will encourage academic and personal encounters and exchanges across national, religious, cultural and disciplinary divides.