CFP: Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners

This multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the crucial place that strangers, aliens and foreigners have for the constitution of self, communities and societies. In particular the project will assess world transformations, like phenomena we associate with the term ‘globalisation’, new forms of migration and the massive movements of people across the globe, as well as the impact they have on the conceptions we hold of self and other. Looking to encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it means for people, the world over, to forge a sense of self in rapidly changing contexts where it is no longer possible to ignore the importance of strangers, aliens and foreigners for our contemporary nations, societies and cultures.

Papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Transformations of Self

• How is Self interweaved with Other? And the many ways in which Self depends on Other
• Acknowledging the importance of strangers for our lives, for our sense of well-being
• Recognising our dependence on aliens and foreigners for our communities, cities and towns, for our countries and nations
• The decline of the value of sameness and homogeneity, the rise of diversity and plurality
• Opposing the construction of self by othering, excluding and stigmatising

2. Boundaries, Communities and Nations

• Who is a stranger? Aliens and foreigners to whom?
• New migrants, new migratory flows and massive movements from peripheral to central countries
• Trans-national networks and the blurring of boundaries; are we living trans-national and post-national realities?
• Assimilation, integration, adaptation and other forms of placing the responsibility of change on foreigners
• What has happened to ideas like acceptance, hospitality and cosmopolitanism

3. Economies, Institutions and Migrants

• Labour migration as key for economic growth and prosperity
• The politics of making aliens, foreigners and migratory labour ‘invisible’
• Global politics of money over people; new forms of global exclusion
• Social movements, new rebellion and alternative globalisations
• Trans-cultural connections that escape institutional and political control

4. Art and Representations

• Production and reproduction of cultural typing and stereotyping
• The contested space of representing self and other, native and foreigner
• Art, media and how to challenge the rigid constructions of art and culture
• Fictions of strangers, stories of aliens, fables of foreigners
• The artistic constructions of otherness

5. Self (inevitably) linked to Other

• De-centering selves; who am I if not the relation with others?
• Thinking and acting with others in mind; orienting life inter-subjectively
• Tensions, contradictions and conflicts of living recognising aliens and foreigners
• Bonds of care across boundaries of inequality and exclusion, ideologies and religions, politics and power, nations and geography
• Non-recognition as social and cultural violence

The 2012 meeting of Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners will run alongside a second of our projects on Beauty and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects. Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords E-mails should be entitled: Strangers Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Dr S. Ram Vemuri
School of Law and Business, Faculty of Law, Business and Arts
Charles Darwin University
Darwin NT0909
Australia
Email: [email protected]

Rob Fisher
Network Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
E-Mail: [email protected]