from Team
Transcultural multiple affiliations: Spaces, Materialities, Memories
International and interdisciplinary conference of the DFG Research Training Group 1608/2 Self-Formation. Practices of Subjectivation in Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspective and the Research Centre Genealogy of the Present.
Venue: University of Oldenburg, 4-6 February 2016
Concept and organisation: Prof. Dr. Dagmar Freist, Prof. Dr. Sabine Kyora and Prof. Dr. Melanie Unseld
Contact and registration: Marta Mazur, selbstbildungen@uni-oldenburg.de
You can view and download the conference flyer here: Conference flyer.
Belongings, according to one of the basic assumptions of social theory, always exist in relation to something and, from a historical perspective, can be described and derived institutionally (clubs, associations, etc.), socially (milieus, groups), culturally (religion, music, art, literature) and legally (territories, nation) as well as medially (letter networks, internet forums). Belongings are highly relevant for people's self-positioning and their perception of themselves and others.
Belongings are both the starting point and the result of individual and collective forms of subjectivation, observable, for example, in the creation of specific (sub)cultural milieus, language, clothing, music, tastes and rituals. Admissions can be spatially located, they are materialised in things and their uses and they are incorporated into the collective memory of groups and permanently (re)updated.
A recent social anthropological study has drawn attention to the affective dimension of belonging (Pfaff-Czernecka 2012), which is based on the need for (self-)localisation in familiar social fields, in the reference to shared knowledge and experiences. From a praxeological perspective, one could argue that belonging produces routines and practices in a world of shared meanings and is simultaneously produced by them. In particular, praxeological-sociological studies have emphasised the latent "common sense" of common action and speech as well as the effectiveness of collective knowledge and interpretation schemes that suggest certain ways of acting and reject others as inappropriate (Hörning 2001).
If this latent "common sense" is the basis of intelligent social behaviour and at the same time the affective dimension of belonging, the question arises as to how belonging can be conceived in societies that were and are characterised by migration and social and spatial mobility. Research on diaspora communities, for example, has long emphasised the exclusivity of these generally ethnically and religiously homogeneous groups and the effectiveness of virtually postulated, de-territorialised commonalities. In the light of globalisation since the early modern period, more recent studies have revisited the question of affiliations from a transcultural perspective (Medick/Ulbrich/Schaser 2012). This is not primarily about the degree of hybridisation of societies and its cultural, religious and social implications, but about the question of how multiple cultural affiliations are formed with reference to very different spatial and temporal dimensions of affiliations and how they shape the self-positioning of people in these space/time dimensions.
This is where the planned international and interdisciplinary conference comes in. In an interdisciplinary and diachronic academic dialogue, the analysis of self-testimonies from a wide variety of provenances will be used to examine how actors locate their selves in different time/space dimensions that can be experienced in parallel, albeit offset in time and space. How are ruptures dealt with, how are multiple affiliations experienced, shaped and thematised, which narrative patterns are invoked and which artistic practices and those of self-formation become observable in transculturally displaced space/time structures? Which aesthetic continuities, which discontinuities, which artistic practices of multiple localisation become recognisable? How do artistic multiple localisations and acculturation processes relate to each other? How do time and space structures, memory and the present intertwine in narratives of the self, i.e. in autobiographies, diaries and other ego documents? What role does the materiality of affiliations play, which is expressed in ways of dealing with things and artistic practices? What loss or transformation of meaning do things and artistic practices experience in new contexts, over the course of generations, and what role do they play as knowledge repositories and markers of a past but currently actualised spatio-temporal affiliation?
The conference will be immediately followed by workshops for young scholars who will explore these questions in greater depth on the basis of their own research.