6th International Symposium: Identity and Multicultural Politics

6th International Symposium:
Identity and Multicultural Politics

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

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

Monday 29th to Wednesday 31st of October, 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Call for Papers

This trans-disciplinary research project is
interested in identifying the conflicting forces
and political realities of multiculturalism and
of identity formations in diverse political,
societal and cultural contexts.

Identity claims and social identity formations
have become more prevalent, fluid and less fixed
throughout societies. People in their local,
regional, national and even international
contexts are systematically making claims about
group identities, which have consequences for
politics, social relations and a cultural sense
of belonging. In the past decades, important
changes have been witnessed in legal procedures,
constitutions and cultural normative frameworks
that have produced formal legitimation for
recognition claims based on identity, as well as
political backlashes against these initiatives.
What are the lessons to be learned from these
complex processes and the considerations to be
had for envisioning and contributing to a future
politics of recognition?

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 which address these
general questions or the following themes:

1. New Challenges for a Contemporary Politics of
Recognition

= Policy and Normative Transformations Pushed
by Identity Based Social Movements
- How do we critically account for these
normative experiences?
- How might the history of these movements be
written?
- From a bottom-up perspective, what have we
learned?

= Social Realities Lived and Cultural Changes
Enacted under Multicultural Policies
- How has policy-making responded to the needs
for social and cultural recognition? What are
the virtues and problems with this route?
- From a top-down perspective, what have we
learned?
- How have these conflicts and tensions, demands
and needs, dreams and goals been normalized?
- What do these processes mean for the
construction of identity?

= Multicultural Backlashes
- Has the 'multicultural project' become defunct
and/or inadequate? Is it any longer feasible?
- What motives and reasoning inform such
assertions?
- How do these political claims affect the
current debate on multiculturalism in specific
national and regional contexts and
internationally?

2. Talking Back: Contemporary Identity
Formations

= Exploring New Identity Formations
- What are the new identities that are emerging?
- Are these new identities more fluid or less
fluid than other formations?
- Are these new identities establishing
different forms of relation to the nation
state?

= Context and Politics
- How do these new identity formations relate to
other more established identities or to state
sanctioned identities?
- Is there an inter-identity formation politics
that needs to be accounted for?
- How are these new identities talking back? In
what ways are they unsettling and/or supporting
the current system of state-centered sanctioned
recognition?

= Contestation and Conciliations
- Are these new emerging identities questioning
old formations; if so, how?
- What means both social and political are being
used to contest their non-recognition?
- What avenues ? state-centered or otherwise ?
are being sought to secure recognition?
- Is there a new politics of recognition that is
not based on identity claims?

3. Nationalism & Inclusion

= Re-emerging Nationalisms and the Politics of
Inclusion
- What effects have massive migratory flows had
on a politics of inclusion and on territorial
forms of belonging?
- How are belonging and inclusion being
redefined both within and outside nationalistic
discourses?

= Migration and Subject Positions
- How are migrants accommodating to conditions
of discrimination and marginality they face in
host territories?
- How are migrants organizing politically and
claiming their rights and place within host
nations?
- How might inclusive categories of hospitality
and cosmopolitanism have political and cultural
transformative value?

= Territory, Home and Rooted-ness
- What new conceptions of belonging and its link
to territory, home and roots can be developed to
better accommodate diversity and otherness?
- How do we generate concepts of belonging that
are more fluid and in sync to the current
conditions of mobility, migration and diversity?
- How do we give collective credence and
legitimacy to multiplicity and emphasize bonds
rather than place as a more fluid yet stable
sense of belonging?

4. Art, Contestation & Aesthetic Critique

= Aesthetic Expressions of Identity
Construction
- In what ways is art being employed as a means
for redefining and reconfiguring identity at
both the personal and societal level?
- How much do these aesthetic experiences seep
into the fabric of social life?
- How can we explore the productive effect of
art on forms of identity construction?

= New Voices and New Critiques
- How is art and art expression responding to
the need to redefine identity?
- How might art serve as a model in the creation
of new ways of experiencing self and otherness,
of understanding identity formation processes?

= Unsettling Stable Forms of Identity
- How can we participate and foster processes of
critical and creative aesthetic innovation for
identity perception and agency?
- Is their a space for playfulness and joy that
can come our way by the exercise of art for the
insertion of instability in identity
formations?

5. Multicultural Interlacing & Contemporary Life

= History and Multiplicity
- How can we tell the long history of the
experience of multiculturalism?
- How have new patterns of massive migration and
globalization contributed and changed the
telling of this story?

= Image and Representations
- How can more fluid and less rigid perceptions
of social and cultural forms of identity be
constructed?
- What conception of responsibility must be
developed to accompany the creation of new
models of political agency?

= Horizons
- How might we create new horizons in political,
cultural and social relations between migrants
and natives, host and guests, self and other,
center and periphery, privilege and marginality?
- How can we instill a sense of co-
responsibility and accountability in societies
and cultures alike?

6. New Bonds for Self & Other

= Self and Other Intertwined
- As identities are socially constructed,
performatively enacted and re-made, how are
societies and cultures acknowledging these
processes?
- What are the political consequences of
recognizing the intertwining of self and other?

= Bewildered Self
- Can the self be defined outside its binds to
the other?
- How can we account for a selfhood that lives
under the fantasy of being unlinked from other?
- Must the self/other relationship be conceived
in terms of hostility? What new models might
allow for a redefinition of the bond as vital
dependency and interlaced identity formations?

= Self in the Other & Other in the Self
- How are people, groups and organizations
contributing to an ethics of social relations
that embeds self in other and vice versa?
- What can we learn from these experiences?


If you are interested in participating in this
Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word
abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.  Please
use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we
ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF
formats, only and that you use plain text,
resisting the temptation of using special
formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Please send emails with your proposals to the
Annual Symposium Coordination address (imp-
[email protected]) with the following
subject line: Identity & Multicultural Politics
Abstract Proposal.

For every abstract proposal sent, we acknowledge
receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us
within one week you should assume we did not
receive it. Please resend from your account and
from an alternative one, to make sure your
proposal does get to us.

All presentation and paper proposals that
address these questions and issues will be fully
considered and evaluated. Accepted abstracts
will require a full draft paper by Friday 31st
of August, 2012. Papers presented at the
symposium are eligible for publication as part
of a digital or paperback book.

We invite colleagues and people interested in
participating to disseminate this call for
papers. Thank you for sharing and cross-listing
where and whenever appropriate.

Hope to meet you in Montreal!

Symposium Coordinators:

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
General Coordinator
International Network for Alternative Academia
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Email: [email protected]

Iain McKenna
Founding Member & Project Coordinator
International Network for Alternative Academia
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Email: [email protected]


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