This panel explores how cultural genealogies—artistic, intellectual, political, and linguistic—are constructed, resisted, and reimagined across French and Francophone spaces. Far from being fixed or linear, inheritance often manifests through discontinuities, silences, and contested claims. Artists and thinkers engage with prior figures, movements, and traditions in ways that may reaffirm legacies, subvert them, or create entirely new configurations of belonging and dissent. Whether through homage, revision, irony, or deliberate omission, these acts of (dis)inheritance speak to larger dynamics of memory, power, and transformation.

The Unitarian Universalist Studies Network – founded in 2021 via a merger of the UU History and Heritage Society and UU Collegium – is committed to encouraging valuable original research done to investigate our UU and liberal religious past and to integrate findings gained from serious exploration of ethics and theology. Our work is informed by our commitment to countering oppression in all of its intersecting forms in the belief that such study will critically challenge our sense of who we have been as a religious movement, and deepen our aspiration to be a just, inclusive, and beloved community as Unitarian Universalists today.

Conference online (via Zoom): 28-29 July 2025

CFP:

          It is widely known that ideologies of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are dangerous and spread all over the world. We want to examine these terms as much as possible, from many perspectives and variable aspects: in politics, society, psychology, culture, and many more. We also want to devote considerable attention to how the phenomena of racism, nationalism and xenophobia are represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts.​