Kingston University Postgraduate Conference

Migrancy and the Text

Keynote Lecture by Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway)

'Migrancy, Newness and the Problems of Tradition'

Saturday 6th November 2010, 9.30am – 5.00pm

Kingston University, Penrhyn Road Campus, London, KT1 2EE, UK

This one day-conference aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum for postgraduate students and early career researchers working in literary, cultural, media and film studies, creative writing and critical theory. The conference aims at exploring the concept of migrancy in literary, critical and cultural texts and critically investigates the usefulness of the concept. How has migrancy been represented and/or appropriated by 'migrant' and other writers, artists and intellectuals in their work? How useful is the concept of migrancy when it becomes cut off from the lived experiences of migration and different histories of movement? We invite 20-minute papers, as well as 60-minute panel proposals, from postgraduate students and early career researchers across the arts and humanities, that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

 Migrancy in/and the Text/Film/Media/Performance
 Migrancy between Texts: Intertextuality, Creative writing
 Migrancy and Travel Writing: Old and New Travellers
 Migrating Concepts and Theories: Migrating between Disciplines
 Migrant Intellectuals/Academics/Writers/Cultural Workers
 Migrating Texts: Translation and 'Lost in Translation', Encounters with texts, Re-turning to texts, Moving away from texts, Texts that 'travel well'
 Migrancy: Between Lived Experience and Metaphor
 Critique of Migrancy as 'New Cosmopolitanism'
 Migrancy as Queer/Queer Migrations
 Migrant Melancholia/Melancholic Migrants (Ahmed, 2010)
 Migrancy and the Postcolonial

Deadline for abstracts: 27 September 2010
Submission method online at: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/conferences/abstracts/

Conference Organisers
Vedrana Velickovic and Heidi James
(v.velickovic@kingston.ac.uk and
H.James-Dunbar@kingston.ac.uk).