Otherness, Agency and Belonging

Part of the Research Program on: Recognition, Agency and the Politics of Otherness

International Network for Alternative Academia
(Extends a general invitation to participate)

This trans-disciplinary research project explores the unfolding dynamic of the relationship between self and other as it is enacted in our experiences of being strangers, aliens and foreigners. Examining the history of this relationship, reflecting upon its ideological and psychological foundations, and bearing witness to its manifestation in the lived experiences of migrants, refugees and the displaced, this symposium offers the opportunity to consider at the level of both theory and practice, new means for establishing a sense of belonging and new methods for engaging the other.

We invite colleagues from all disciplines and professions interested in exploring and explaining these issues in a collective, deliberative and dialogical environment to send presentation proposals that address these general questions or the following themes:

1. Practice, Logic and Dialogue

=> Being and Belonging
- How is belonging conceptualized? How is it lived?
- What are the psychological and the ideological foundations for the need to belong?
- How do ideals of belonging shape and inform the practice of recognition?
- How is the need to belong politicized?
- In what ways are notions of belonging being reconfigured in response to the rise of new technologies and new media? In what ways is the need to belong shaping these developments?

=> Language Lessons
- Can we speak of the self without the other? Can there be a language of ‘we-ness’? What terms would it employ? How would the grammar for such a language be constructed?
- What metaphors can be employed in the construction of alternatives to binary representations of self and other?
- How are new languages -new terminologies and new structures- being lived? That is, how are they already shaping experience through and in the development of idioms and rhetoric, signs and symbols?
- What alternatives might dialogical acts of speaking provide for addressing the other and the self? How might referential acts be used as a model for rethinking self-other relations?
- What role might embodiment and location play in rethinking difference?

2. Shifting Planes and Contexts

=> Monetary Values
- What is the role of labour migration for economic growth and prosperity? How are the contributions of labour migration being recognized? How are they being measured?
- How is migrant labour commodified? What are the effects of this commodification?
- What is the political value of migrants and foreigners, strangers and aliens, refugees and the displaced? How are they made ‘invisible’ within nations and states? At what moments are they made visible? How is this dialectic of visibility played out, experienced and conceived?
- What new models of economic/political inclusion/exclusion are we witnessing?

=> Environment and the Link to Nature
- How are self and other interweaved with nature? What norms,
orientations and models prevail? Are there alternatives that are being collectively enacted? How might these bonds be reconceptualised?
- What indigenous worldviews might foster the construction of new models of diversity and plurality?
- How is the new class of environmental migrants being constructed and conceived?

=> A Whole New World
- Who are the new migrants? How are new migratory flows and massive movements mapping out, both literally and figuratively?
- How are trans-national and post-national ideologies reconfiguring our conceptions of the other?
- Who is our neighbour? Do we owe our neighbour hospitality and respect? Why?
- How is responsibility to be attributed in a world that is on the move?

3. Enquiry and Legitimacy

=> Representations
- How are representations of difference created and disseminated through the arts and media?
- By what means and through what measures do art and media instil and embed images of otherness? How might these avenues of production be used to transform and deconstruct such representations?
- How are new technologies and new media framing our ideas of otherness?
- What are the stories of strangers, the allegories of aliens, the fictions of foreigners and the discourses of the displaced being told? How are such narratives constructed? With what affect?

=> Acts of Legitimation: On Law
- How do nation states exclude juridically? How do laws protect and/or exclude the other?
- How do citizens and non-citizens relate within juridical practices and discourse?
- What place do human rights occupy in facilitating inclusionary and/or exclusionary practices?
- How are trans-national and post-national ideologies configuring conceptions of self and other?

4. Challenging Ideals

=> Productive Possibilities
- How do our encounters with strangers, aliens and foreigners enrich our lives?
- What are the productive advantages of being deemed ‘the other’?
- What of our experiences of ‘othering’ ourselves? When and why do we choose to be foreigners? How do these experiences differ from those in which we are ascribed this condition and status?

=> The Spaces In-Between: Beyond Self and Other
- In what ways are self and other interdependent? What is the history of this interlacing?
- How are the layerings and overlappings of our identifications as self and other, self or other lived?
- What new models of/for exchange and engagement are developing in theory and in practice?
- How might new models of cultural contact based on ideals of fusion, entanglement, doubleness, syncretism, amalgamation, creolization, interlacing, hybridization and interdependence, destabilize the logic of a binary system of self and other? How might they re-enforce this logic?

If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.