Upcoming Conferences and Meetings in Europe

Lisbon, Portugal 

How does Africa look at its past, its present, its future? Rather than wondering about the reality of specific African conceptions of historical time, the CIEA7 proposes to examine the terms by which African societies refer to a transformative vision of the past and the dynamics of the present, in search of visions of the future. Our aim is to see how their visions transcend the particular identities of societies and nations of the continent and evaluate their regional, political and religious variations.

Fifty years after the independence of most African countries, the continent is facing a range of new opportunities for international dialogue. Such new opportunities undermine traditional assumptions that relate to their historical relationship with their former colonizing countries while valuing the nature and variety of their cultural heritage.

Various African societies have found innovative responses to the challenges of globalization, either relating to the fields of trade, politics and culture or to the complex scenarios of economic, environmental and energy crises that have been affecting all humanity. These responses and the accompanying re-readings of the past have been the basis of profound identity shifts that reveal the weaknesses of attempts to apply external models of society and state of European and American origin to African countries.

For the three plenary sessions of the Congress, the Executive Board considers it important to define a set of specific topics focused on recent transformations in African historiography, an analysis of the contemporary dynamics of African states, and conflicting perceptions of the continent's future.

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Loughborough, United Kingdom

Writings of Intimacy seeks to explore the significance of intimacy in and for the writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our most intimate relationships are those which can powerfully define and nurture us, hurt and grieve us. Our intimate relationships can powerfully define and nurture, hurt and grieve us. Yet intimacy is not always experienced with those we know well: it is possible between strangers or in temporary situations. Nor is it always positive: intimate acts can involve violence, torture and rape. Writings of Intimacy wishes to investigate the way in which intimacy has been written: its representation and theorisation.

Over the course of the twentieth century there was a marked rise in the explicitness with which intimacy was represented in literary texts. In part this was linked to challenges to, and the subsequent relaxation of, censorship laws. Literary writers have used intimacy in various ways to disrupt genre boundaries, to question the definitions of taste, and to experiment with literary forms and narrative voices, as well as to present their readers with a more visceral engagement with the body, its acts, and our desires. There are intimate forms of writing, such as love poetry, autobiography, eulogies and personal letters, which are an essential part of our literary heritage. Critical theory, too, has become increasingly interested in defining and discussing intimacy and its impact upon our lives, and this engagement is much indebted to the discourses of psychoanalysis.

Writings of Intimacy has seen an exciting international response to the call for papers. Our delegates will be addressing some of the following areas in relation to intimacy: poetry, prose, theatre, theory, life writing, modernism, aesthetics, art, creative and artistic practice, law, experimentalism, violence, psychoanalysis and the clinical encounter, feminism, gender and queer theory.

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Leeds, United Kingdom

In the history of every museum there has been a significant engagement with the wider market structures and yet these engagements rarely feature in the interpretation of the history of the objects as we encounter them in the modern museum. The museum has also, since its inception, been involved in the cultural and the economic structures of society. Indeed, museums are now seen as crucial signifiers and influential catalysts in what we now call the ‘cultural economy'. It is therefore appropriate, given the current interest in the commercial aspects of the history of collections and the interest in the museum itself as part of the ‘market', to look anew at the role played by the market in the history of the museum. This innovative conference, one of the first of its kind, focuses on the intersections, the formal and informal spaces where the market and the museum meet and overlap. The papers reflect a wide range of interests and perspectives and bring together leading academics and museum professionals in order to further discussion and debate around this increasingly significant subject. Located at the new Leeds City Museum, the conference will be of interest to academics, museum professionals, and all those who are interested in the history of the museum and its role in society.

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Vlore, Albania

"Enough, one must go on, these are things that one thinks but does not say." Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Levi's quotation naturally reminds us that the unsaid engages the area of thinking, of silence, whereas the said that of utterance and language. Interpreted in these terms, the said and the unsaid occupy a presence - absence position, which proposes, to use a structuralist term, a binary opposition between thought and language. Generally speaking, although language is conceived as materialization of thought, they are not necessarily the same. It happens that other barriers (mental, psychological, social, ethical etc) interfere and do not allow our mouth to give shape to what our mind thinks. The unsaid becomes in this way a kind of subtext, an unconscious that exerts great power for interpretation.

The conference welcomes papers which involve issues exploring the relationship between silence and speech, language and thought and their representation in areas of linguistics, literature, cultural studies etc.

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Bristol, United Kingdom

An interdisciplinary conference, open to research students from across the Social Sciences, Arts, Humanities and Environmental Studies.

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