MIGRANT CINEMA AND WRITING IN POST-COLONIAL ITALY: Warwick 24 Feb., 25 Feb., 2 Mar. 2011

The Department of Italian at Warwick is pleased to announce a series of three events on Migrant Cinema and Writing in Post-colonial Italy. These events focus on different aspects of Italian contemporary literature and culture such as migration,post-coloniality, orality, diaspora, ethnicity, multiculturalism, nationhood and subalternity. Writers Ribka Sibhatu and Kaha Mohamed Aden will present at the University of Warwick their literary work as well as the documentaries, in which they tell of the legacy of Italian colonialism and their migratory experience to Italy, respectively from Eritrea and Somalia. The discussion of social and historical themes and questions in post-colonial Italian literature, is helpful in order to determine how the amnesia over the colonial past influences the mis-representation of immigrants to Italy.

Thursday 24th February 2011
Research Symposium: A Post-colonial Italian Discourse?

Organized by the Italian Department in collaboration with the Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick

Ramphal Building - Gillian Rose Room - R3.25
17.30 – 19.00 A Post-colonial Italian Discourse?

Ribka Sibhatu

Respondents:
Neil Lazarus (University of Warwick)
Jennifer Burns (University of Warwick)

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Friday 25th February 2011
Contemporary Rome: Engaging with the Past, Projecting the Future

Department of Italian Studies, University of Warwick
Humanities Building - Room H545

15.00 – 16.00 Film Screening: Simone Brioni’s Aulò (ITA, 2011, 40’)
(Ribka Sibhatu, an Italian writer of Eritrean origins who lives in Rome, tells her story of migration and discusses the history of Italian colonialism. The film is in Italian, without English subtitles.)
16.00 – 16.30 Post-colonial Rome
Discussion with Ribka Sibhatu
16.30 – 17.00 Coffee Break
17.00 – 18.00 Il museo diffuso di Testaccio e il progetto Porticus Aemilia.
Renato Sebastiani, Alessia Contino, Boudewijn Kaiser, Krien
Clevis, Gert-Jan Burgers (Royal Netherlands Institute at Rome)
18.00 – 19.00 Film Screenings: The Postmodern Palimpsest. A series of short documentaries shot in Rome, created by Masters students at the Manchester School of Architecture. This event precedes the conference ‘The Post-modern Palimpsest: Narrating
Contemporary Rome’, which will take place at the University of Warwick the following day.

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Wednesday 2nd March 2011

Challenging Official Historiography: Oral History and Migrant Writing in Italy

Organized by the Italian Department in collaboration with the IAS (Institute of Advanced Studies)

IAS Seminar Room- Milburn House
14.00 – 15.00 Orality and Literacy in the Narratives of Some Italian Migrant Writers.
Kombola Ramadhani Moussa (University of Reading)
15.00 – 16.00 Oral History and Migrant Writing in Italy Videoconference with Alessandro Portelli (Università La Sapienza, Roma)
16.00 – 16.30 Coffee Break
16.30 – 17.30 Film Screening: Simone Brioni’s La quarta via (ITA, 2009, 40’)
(Kaha Mohamed Aden narrates her memories of Mogadishu and reconstructs its story in Pavia, where she currently lives. The film has English subtitles.)Introduced by Elizabeth Ramirez Soto (Department of Film Studies, University of Warwick)
17.30 – 19.30 Fra-intendimenti. Kaha Mohamed Aden presents her collection of short stories Fra-intendimenti (Roma, Nottetempo, 2010) Respondent: Federico Faloppa (University of Reading)

This event is preceded by the interdisciplinary seminar '1968 and the Value of Oral History', which will take place on Wednesday 23 February 2011, 10 am- 6pm. For any questions please contact the organiser Simone Brioni: s.brioni@warwick.ac.uk
Generously supported by the IALT.

CFP: IMAGES / Films as Spaces of Cultural Encounters (Istanbul, 1-4 June 2011)

Call for Papers
IMAGES; Films as Spaces of Cultural Encounters

A 4-days international and interdisciplinary conference
Kadir Has University Cibali Campus, Istanbul
1-4 June, 2011 (90% confirmed)

The conference IMAGES Films as Spaces of Cultural Encounters will be co-organized as a public 4-days international and interdisciplinary conference by the University of Innsbruck research platform CEnT – Cultural Encounters and Transfer and Kadir Has University (Istanbul) in cooperation with CINEJ, the refereed online journal for film and photography. The conference will be supported by the Austrian Culture Forum Istanbul.

The conference will bring together senior scholars with PhD students, and postdoctoral academics, without following the classical keynote speaker pattern but rather inviting all speakers either to present their research findings in 20-30 minute (paper) presentations plus 10 minutes for discussion or in 120-150 minute panels (4-5 panellists).
There will be no parallel sessions. All sessions will be plenary sessions.
There will also be room provided for presentations of creative works (artistic student works) focussing on the conference topic. The conference language is English.

Conference coordinators are:
Assoc. Prof. (Privatdozentin) Dr. Veronika Bernard (University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck/ Austria) and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Serhan Oksay (Kadir Has University, Istanbul/ Turkey), Dr. Vedat Akman (Kadir Has University, Istanbul/ Turkey)

The official conference blog (under construction)
The official conference e-mail address is: images-1@gmx.at
Deadline for paper and panel proposals is: 1 March, 2011
Deadline for artistic student works proposals is: 1 March, 2011
Paper and panel proposals have to include a 150 words abstract and a 150 words Bio.
Artistic student works proposals have to include a 150 words abstract and a 50 words
Bio.

Please, send your proposals to the official conference e-mail address: images-1@gmx.at

Proposers will be informed about acceptance of their proposal within 1 week after
receipt.

The conference IMAGES; Films as Spaces of Cultural Encounters is is designed to be an
interdisciplinary project on cultural encounters, poverty and migration.
Sessions may focus on the following issues but are also open to further thematic fields deriving from paper proposals received:

- ethnicity and the national issue in pre- and post-colonial films
- gender, age, and ethnicity in (mass)entertainment films
- the image of the outsider and the outcast
- the image of mainstream society
- the enemy vs. the friend in secret agent and action films produced during and
after the cold war period
- the idea of co-existence in block buster animation films
- the identity issue in films by directors/ authors of migrant background
- prize-winning films and their cultural messages
- ethnicity, gender, age and the idea of co-existence in
advertising/ promotion clips

Book Presentation: SCREENING STRANGERS / UCL 2 February 2011

Dear all,

it's my pleasure to invite you to the presentation of the book “Screening
Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema”, by
prof. Yosefa Loshitzky (East London University).
The presentation will take place at the UCL Italian Department the 2nd of
February at 5pm. Prof. David Forgacs will chair the session.
The event is part of the research seminars organized by the UCL Italian
Department. All welcome!
For further information please contact me: f.mazzara@ucl.ac.uk. Find all
details below.

************************************************************************
“Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European
Cinema”

Chair: Prof. David Forgacs

Wednesday, 2 February 2011
5.00 - 7.00pm
Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351

Yosefa Loshitzky challenges the utopian notion of a post-national "New
Europe" by focusing on the waves of migrants and refugees that some view
as a potential threat to European identity, a concern heightened by the
rhetoric of the war on terror, the London Underground bombings, and the
riots in Paris's banlieues. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle,
Loshitzky determines patterns in the representation and negotiation of
European identity in several European films from the late 20th and early
21st centuries, including Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged, Stephen Frears’s
Dirty Pretty Things, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, and Michael
Winterbottom's In This World, Code 46, and The Road to Guantanamo.

Find details of the book here


For information about the all series of research seminars organized by the
UCL Italian Department/SELCS:

Book: IMAGES OF ILLEGALIZED IMMIGRATION

New book on "Images of Illegalized Immigration: Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics", edited by Christine Bischoff, Francesca Falk, Sylvia Kafehsy (Transcript: 2010)


Illegalized immigration is a highly iconic topic. The public perception of the current regime for mobility is profoundly shaped by visual and verbal images. As the issue of illegalized immigration is gaining increasing political momentum, the authors feel it is a well-warranted undertaking to analyze the role of images in the creation of illegalization. Their aim is to trace the visual processes that produce these very categories.
The authors aim to map out an iconography of illegalized immigration in relation to political, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. They discuss the need to project new images as well as the dangers of giving persons without legal papers an individual face. Illegalization is produced by law, but naturalized through the everyday use of images. The production of law, on the other hand, is also driven by both mental and materialized images. A critical iconology may help us to see these mechanisms.


More details here.

Blog: Tracing Mobility

I'd like to bring your attention to this very interesting blog on Cartography and Migration in networked space.

TRACING MOBILITY

Tracing Mobility is a project that sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how the hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance...

CFP_Within and Without: Representing Diasporas in Europe: Cardiff, 13 May 2011

Within and Without: Representing Diasporas in Europe
School of European Studies, University of Cardiff
May 13th 2011

Europe is a diasporic continent, with Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish populations scattered across the globe. Yet it is also home to diasporic communities based in Europe, coming from both within and outside of the continent. The aim of this symposium is to explore the way in which diasporas in Europe are depicted in literature, film and the press, exploring the ways in which a sense of cultural and geographical dislocation inform concepts of identity, otherness and (un)belonging in the host nation. The symposium will examine the intersections between cultural, religious and pan-European identities within the diasporic community, in the destination culture and in contact zones.
Contributors are invited to address European diasporas within Europe (such as the Italian communities in Britain) and/or diasporas from outside the continent (such as the Turkish communities in Germany).

Topics may include (but are not restricted to):
- Explorations of ethnic identity in the literatures of the diaspora, and the host nation
- Depictions of 'home' in diasporic cultural production
- The shaping of cultural memory in the diaspora
- Press coverage of the diasporic culture in the host nation
- Comparison of integration of European populations within European and non-European diasporas (e.g. Italians in Germany and the U.S)
- Ghettoization and blending
- Iconography of the diaspora
- The construction of space (rural and urban, private and public, blurred boundaries)
- The diasporic gaze
- Orientalism in one continent
- Theoretical approaches to diasporic writing

The one-day symposium will take place on Friday May 13th 2011 at the School of European Studies, University of Cardiff.
There will be a fee of 15GBP, which includes lunch, tea and coffee and a wine reception.
Abstracts of 300 words, and a brief biography, should be sent to:
Dr Liz Wren-Owens (Wren-OwensEA@cardiff.ac.uk) by January 31st 2011.

Call for paper: Displaced Women (Glasgow 29 March 2012)

Displaced Women:
Multilingual Narratives of Migration in Europe

Organised by Dr. Lucia Aiello, Dr. Joy Charnley, Dr. Mariangela Palladino

29 March 2012
Glasgow Women’s Library
5 Berkeley Street, Glasgow, G3 7BW
t: 0141 248 9969 e: info@womenslibrary.org.uk

This interdisciplinary conference will provide a forum for discussion of the issues facing women who have moved from one culture to another and have as a result adopted in their daily lives and for their creative work a language other than their ‘mother tongue’. We will look at the creative, linguistic, economic and psychological effects of this displacement. The critical examination of women’s narratives in Europe (fiction, poetry, diaries, memoirs, pamphlets), from a literary perspective will be complemented by sessions looking at these issues from a historical, political and sociological perspective. The broad nature of this conference provides an excellent opportunity for exchange between researchers in different disciplines who do not always have the chance to come together (literature, cultural studies, social sciences, history etc). In addition, the chosen venue is doubly significant with regards to both women and migration: Glasgow, city of emigration and immigration and the Glasgow Women’s Library, focus in Scotland for much important work on feminism, and women’s history and creativity.

Themes to be covered include the following:

Migrant women: narratives and experiences, multilingual narratives of containment and human resistance; articulating the ‘state of exception’ in a ‘foreign’ tongue; narratives of ‘Eco-Diaspora’ and spaces of environmental crisis;

Multilingual literature, Translation issues in multilingual works, translating cultures; Linguistic ownership; Language and the country of sanctuary; seeking refuge in an-‘other’ language; Translating practices in legal narratives; human dispersal and
the linguistic experience;

Migration; nationality and citizenship; migration policy: past, present and future; speaking from ‘humanitarian corridors’; encampment, removal, deportation, detention; human waste and landscapes of waste: a female perspective.

Abstracts in English of no more than 300 words should be sent by 29 APRIL 2011 to
Lucia Aiello (L.Aiello@sheffield.ac.uk), Joy Charnley (j.charnley@phonecoop.coop) and Mariangela Palladino (p.mariangela@googlemail.com). Papers should be 20 minutes in length and accessible to a multidisciplinary audience. Proposals for thematic workshops are also welcome. The publication of a selection of papers following the conference is planned.

UCL Italian research seminars_Spring term 2011

Dear all,

please find here all details about the series of research seminars I have organized at UCL for the coming months.

All Welcome!
Federica

ANTHROPOLOGY OF FOOD, Journal issue on "Migration, food practices and social relations" (7:2010)

Dear all,
have a look at the last online issue of Anthropology of Food, on the topic "Migration, food practices and social relations: when continuity is not reproduction and discontinuity is not rupture", edited by Jean-Pierre Hassoun and F.Xavier Medina and myself Chantal Crenn.

Conference_The Others in Europe and Beyond_Brussels 28-29 April 2011

Interdisciplinary International Conference

Migration, Ethnicisation and the Challenge of Diversity: The“Others” in Europe and Beyond

Université Libre de Bruxelles, 28-29 April 2011

In contemporary Europe, the social tensions and political debates produced by immigration are increasingly linked to issues of belonging and identity. The representation of the foreigner is no longer solely defined by his or her place on the labour market or in the social hierarchy. In light of EU enlargement and due to immigration flows, European societies are increasingly questioning their “cultural and ethnic identity”. As a consequence, boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” are being redefined. The “others” in Europe are no longer merely those who do not have state citizenship of one of the member states of the Union. In the new European migration context, “otherness” increasingly refers to ethno-cultural minority groups, regardless of their EU citizenship status.
This conference aims to address the construction of identity classifications underlying new forms of inclusion and exclusion that are to be found in contemporary Europe, and beyond. Its scope covers practices of categorization and of resistance, both by majority and minority groups. Anthropologists, social psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and law scholars will meet to discuss the categorization of identity groups through legal and social norms, public policies, institutional practices, social interactions and representations, as well as actors’ mobilizations.

For all details click here.

London Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference (31 Aug.-2 Sept 2011)_Call for Paper for session on "Returning Migration"

(Re-)Imagining ‘Return Migration’: Language, concepts and contexts

London 31 August-2 September 2011

Session organisers: Anastasia Christou (Sussex) and Madeleine Hatfield (RHUL and RGS-IBG).
Sponsored by the Population Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG.

Return migration has increasingly become the subject of research that seeks to go beyond previously taken-for-granted assertions of such mobilities as straight forward due to the assumed familiarity of the destination. This research has addressed the experience of moving to somewhere one has lived before or to where one is thought to belong under a number of sub-headings including not just return migration but repatriation, reflux or cyclical migration, diasporic or ancestral return and homecomings. It has studied migrants returning after a short time and after generations; as children, adults and households; together and apart; from higher to lower and lower to higher income countries; painfully, hopefully and forcefully.
This growing body of research, then, also has the potential to allow us to (re-)imagine and (re-)think what ‘return migration’ is or could be; and to (re-)consider how the words we use are not just terminology but active constructs that affect the ways in which return migration is experienced, understood and imagined. We therefore invite researchers of return migration in different contextual and disciplinary settings to showcase their research and present on the conceptualisation, application and documentation of return migration as broadly defined.
Please submit proposed paper abstracts (c. 250 words) for consideration of inclusion in the session to organisers Anastasia Christou (A.Christou@sussex.ac.uk) and Madeleine Hatfield (madeleine.e.hatfield@gmail.com) by 4 February 2011.

For more general information about the Conference call for paper click here

CRONEM 7th Annual Conference_Call for Paper

Global Migration and Multiculturalism: Religion, Society, Policy and Politics

28 - 29 June 2011, University of Surrey

Deadline for Call for Paper: 15 February 2011

Find all information here

Summer School on Black Europe_Amsterdam 12-30 June 2011

Dear all
The National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its
Legacy (NiNsee) and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam are pleased to announce the fourth annual Summer School on Black Europe entitled:

Black Europe: Exploring Dimensions of Citizenship, Race and Ethnic Relations.

June 12th-30th 2011, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The Summer School on Black Europe emerged out of dialogue and concern of various scholars working in the field of race and ethnic relations in Europe. The program is now in its fourth year and is currently located at the National Institute for the study of Dutch slavery and its legacy (NiNsee).

To find all information click here

Migration week at UCL_6-9 APRIL 2011

A large interdisciplinary conference on migration will take place at UCL from 6th - 9th April 2011.
This academic conference will be embedded in a week long event - "UCL Migration Week", organised by CReAM and UCL Grand Challenges Programme. This week will feature a series of events related to migration, such as Exhibitions, Lectures, Discussions and Film screenings. In addition there will be a Policy Podium, where high level practitioners, politicians and policy media representatives will discuss migration related issues.

More details about the Programme will be posted later.

The call for paper is now closed.

New Approaches to Italian Multilingual Fiction_ 21 January 2011

A very interesting and promising workshop on the topic "Multilingual Writing" has been organized in Leeds by Gigliola Sulis. The workshop will take place the 21st of January 2011.
If you want to know more about the programme you can click here