Program (see http://www.socum.uni-mainz.de/veranstaltung/)
Friday, 19th of October 2012 (new room! Senatssaal, Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, 7. Stock, Campus Mainz)
10:30 Introduction
11:00 Kiesling, Scott (Pittsburgh): Discursive Ways of Crossing
12:30 Lunch
14:00 Jaspal Singh (Cardiff): Icons of repertoires
14:45 Theresa Heyd (Freiburg): Digital ethnolinguistic repertoires and emerging superdiversity: The case of Nigerian Pidgin
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Elisabeth Keller (München): „Emergency Entrance? Emergency Entrance!“ How national theatres use new documentary theatre to discuss and live Europe on stage and beyond
16:45 Lion König (Heidelberg): „Let a Thousand Ramayanas Bloom‟: Crossing, Belonging, and the Contested Space of India‟s Great Epic
Saturday, 20th of October 2012 (new room: Senatssaal, NatFak, 7. Stock)
10:00 Petra Schulte (Köln): Discourses on Wealth in Renaissance Florence
10:45 Justin Walsh (Orange): The Distribution of Greek Pottery in the Ancient Western Mediterranean as a Marker of “Discursive Crossings”
11:30 Coffee Break
11:45 Andreas Beer (Rostock): Southward the Course of Empire Took Its Way: The Discursive Expansion of US Territory to Central America in the Nineteenth Century
12.30 Lunch
14:00 Sanae Elmoudden (New York): Offshore call centers- A new form of discursive crossing
14:45 Heiko Motschenbacher (Frankfurt/Mainz): National Crossing as a Means of European Identity Construction: Evidence from Eurovision Song Contest Press Conferences
15:30-16:00 Final Discussion
Problems, questions and themes
Power relations are never stable but are subject to ongoing negotiation, constantly being confirmed or put into question. In discursive processes of affirmation and subversion, cultural references and symbolic meanings intersect, socialidentities merge or interfere with each other and new knowledge is constructed. In this continual process, multiple and blurry borders are drawn between various linguistic, ethnic, cultural and social affiliations, often organized in problematic oppositional structures such as inside and outside, top and bottom, foreign and familiar. Examining such ongoing negotiations, we take up the term “discursive crossings” in order to designate the citing of linguistic, social, and cultural markers by members of one group that are commonly attributed to another group, arguing that these groups are also constitutedthrough such “discursive crossings,” i.e., citing the other’s markers is not necessarily subversive per se but might in fact be affirmative with regard to the power relations between the various groups.
Taking up the term “crossing” from socio-linguistics, where it means speakers using languages or linguistic varieties they do not “own” (Ben Rampton), we propose to understand “discursive crossings” in three ways: as an intersection of various discourses, as a transgression of boundaries within discourses, and as the idea of exceeding the discursive itself. While similar issues have beenaddressed, for instance, in postcolonial
and gender studies (Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler), we emphasize the constitutive character of “discursive crossings” which—in our view—not only destabilize but also produce the borders and entities that are presumably “crossed.”
The aim of the conference is to look at “discursive crossings” as a problem for the interdisciplinary investigation of the discursive dynamics through which cultural and social order is negotiated. We are looking for approaches to “crossing” that deal with heterogeneous discourses, cultures, and identity politics. Possible contributions would approach the issue of “crossing” from a decisively interdisciplinary perspective, dealing with various aspects of “crossing” in its communicative, social, cultural, and historical dimensions. Papers may either present conceptualizations of “crossing” or case studies that can fruitfully be described as “crossings;” ideally, the papers would combine theoretical reflection and case studies.