The devil not only has all the best music; she also wears Prada. Evil is stylish, elegant, polished, sleak. It is smart, chic, ritzy and always in vogue. Best of all, evil is fashionable. Villains have impeccable wardrobes; super-villains ooze effortless dressed-to-kill public ensembles with all the latest haute couture accessories. All around us, evil cleavage mingles with Joker-painted faces as a definitive statement on our unending fascination with evil.

Evil. Looks. Good.

The seemingly neutral act of dressing our bodies is a fertile ground for moral meaning. As something that everyone needs to do, everyone has the potential to be engaged in conversations about it. Fashion is also an accessible art form, an opportunity for any individual to express their interests, beliefs, or personality in a way that everyone who sees them will also see. As such, fashion can act as a canvas for the personal beliefs of the wearer. This has often made it a target for moral outrages — about exposed skin, about religious symbols emblazoned on t-shirts, about non-normative bodies that are already the objects of scrutiny and criticism from all directions.

The goal of this conference is to develop an interdisciplinary conversation about fashion and evil that includes elements of both fashion as an industry, and fashion as an art form. These conversations will explore elements of fashion as a lifestyle, an art form, an at times iconic cultural product as well as being a material product, an industry and an employer. We particularly welcome input from activists and organizers working at the intersection of fashion industries and humanitarian and environmental concerns.

Read more and submit your proposal here.

In the early 20^th century, fashion and photography were indelibly wedded through the efforts of a number of photographers, fashion designers, and magazine publishers. Once these cultural power shapers created the form, fashion photography took on a life of its own and became—perhaps always was—art. This art form has since been elevated to heights such that being a fashion photographer can be seen as very important chapter in many well-known photographers’ career: designers rely on them; models request them; magazines use their work: celebrities choose them for shoots; and the power they have to represent others is beyond compare in today’s, 21^st century image-driven world.

Following our first Fashion and Photography conference in Palermo in 2018, we are further broadening the interdisciplinary mix and range of potential discussions and activities. Whether dance, theatre, drama theory, directing or performance practice, the different aspects of the performing arts will be explored and developed alongside previous discussions, especially with the new challenges of technology along with the changes in audiences and performers in the 21^st century.

Read more and submit your abstract here.

Textiles surround us in our everyday lives. From the clothes we wear to cover our bodies and communicate who we are​ (or who we would like to be), to household linens and domestic fabrics with which we dress our homes. Textiles are everywhere and hold the memory of our existence. Ubiquitous, they are often undervalued and unseen but under certain circumstances they become totemic, charged with emotion, potent with meaning and powerful in holding memory.
Textiles can be used to convey a political message though use as protest banners or flags – fought over, burned, claimed and reclaimed by different factions. Choices of clothing are used to foster ideas of identity and difference, expression of non – normative behaviours, bonding and tribalism as well as providing a way to provoke discussion, attitude and confrontation. They can also be used in more violent ways as gags, blindfolds, masks or as constrictive garments – corsets and foot bindings.
Textiles have been used in traditional ways to express the political and personal concerns of the present – consider the AIDS quilts, banners and textile reactions to 9/11 – the narrative stitch work of the Bayeux and Overlord Embroideries of their day. Textiles are used in the early years of a child as a transitional object when they are learning to see themselves as a separate being from their mother. The familiarity of textile as a ‘comfort blanket’ means that they have also been used to enable recovery from traumatic events later in life.
This conference seeks to encourage artists, practitioners, independent scholars, early career researchers, photographers, academics, performers, and writers, to intermingle and will provide platforms for interdisciplinary interactions that are fruitful and conducive to broadening horizons and sparking future projects, collaborations, and connections.

Read more and submit your abstract here.

Every day we move through space that has been constructed or delineated somehow to be significant. We recognise and—consciously or unconsciously—react to this significance on a daily or hourly basis, and we draw from a cultural well of knowledge in order to do so.

While we may not be aware of this process, our lives are lived in constant negotiation with these meanings; it is therefore important to examine how we shape the space around us, and what the meanings are that we attach to inside and outside, here and there, mine and yours, and even function and form. Understanding that these meanings are time- and culturally-based broadens these questions, allowing for not only an examination of how they are understood today, but how they were perceived and deployed in the past—and how they might be in the future.

The exciting and productive discussions at our previous meetings dedicated to the topic “Spaces and Places” explored a number of key areas through different disciplinary perspectives: shifting meanings of neighbourhoods through time | mobility between economic and political spaces | the effect of place on emotion and perception | procession and its manipulation of meaning in space | political control of space as a function of controlling protests | fiction and its creation of space | mapping and the deployment of power |
Building on the success of these and other conversations, and the entirety of last year’s conference, we aim to continue to examine the way space is bounded or expanded to create place.

We will continue to explore how the concepts and practicalities that make up our understanding of what spaces and places mean are political, social, and specific to our culture(s), and how space and place dance with each other in the middle of it all.

Read more and submit your proposal here.

The increased visibility of police brutality, forced disappearances, discoveries of unmarked and mass graves, and gendered killings, among other manifestations of systematic violence compels us to grapple with stories of loss, grief, and mourning. To give testimony, to tell and retell what one has witnessed, across time and generations–an historical inheritance of memory, trauma, and engagement. These accounts often take the form of testimony, that is, autobiographical narratives that present evidence of first-person accounts of human rights abuses, violence and war, and life under conditions of social oppression.

such as: human rights and storytelling; trauma and memory; ethics, witnessing, and reconciliation; affect theory and empathy studies; critical pedagogy. Scholars continue to engage questions that address issues of generic hybridity and metamorphosis; uses, reception, and production of testimony; ethical and aesthetic contexts of testimony; and legal and juridical frameworks of testimony.

It is through interdisciplinarity that an examination can be made of the impact and contributions of testimonial production within the cultures of redress and transnational justice processes for both the producers of testimony and their audience.

The third conference in the Testimony series marks the launch of a new five year Special Collaborative Project.

Read more and submit your proposal here.

n a contemporary moment where human mobility is shaped by a global pandemic, the ongoing effects of climate change, and growing economic instability, the role and utility of borders are in need of renewed exploration. The spread of the novel coronavirus has made the ways in which borders structure and constrain our lives apparent to more people than ever. Due to the pandemic, billions of people around the world have faced the realities of confinement to home countries as traversal across international lines has been limited only to those with sufficient claims to citizenship, residence, and now, proof of vaccination. Some argue that in times like these, borders provide security, the preconditions for effective governance, and the distribution of goods and services within a given population. Yet, others might ask to what extent they simultaneously reinforce hegemony and bar access to necessities—such as life saving COVID vaccines and other medical infrastructure—for those who, by mere lottery of birth, happened to be born on the ‘wrong’ side.

Moving beyond conventional notions of borders as static lines separating “us” from “them” and “inside” from “outside,” this conference aims to open a non-essentialist conversation about borders and walls. As inclusive and multidisciplinary, we seek submissions on the varying significance of borders and borderlands across a wide array of contexts and fields including but not limited to architecture, sociology, urban planning, history, anthropology, linguistics, literature, art, poetry, performance, journalism, and cartography. We welcome both traditional and nontraditional formats ranging from empirical research and analysis, ethnography, and journalism to poetry, performance, film, and fictocriticism. Drawing upon this multiplicity of perspectives from people directly affected by borders, our objective is to invite critical reflection with respect to the presence of borders as constructs in contemporary society, their transnational histories, and multidimensional significance. We seek to imagine border alternatives, and to open up space for new approaches and understandings via interdisciplinary exchanges.

Read more and submit your proposal here.

Storytelling is inextricably linked to the history of human beings in a bewildering variety of oral and visual formats. Storytelling is a fundamental tool in communicating and recording personal, familial, communal, and national narratives. But it can also be linked to a process of expressing resistance, of remembering and working through trauma, of breaking silence, of standing up to regimes of power and cultures of erasure. These forms of resistance and remembering can be witnessed in the growth of “communal digital storytelling” embodied, for example, in the rise of shared storytellings of resistance, acknowledgement and trauma such as #NiUnaMás/#NiUnaMenos [#NotOneMore/#NotOneLess], #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and #TimesUp. Forms of storytelling, resistance and remembering also materialize through protests—from the symbolic gesture of taking the knee in football and soccer, to the Indian farmers’ protest—and growing public interventions, such as the removal of statutes of problematic historical figures (eg. slave owners and perpetrators of genocide) and the renaming of streets and schools across the globe. The ability to re-collect, re-tell, re-write, and share stories from and within the margins brings into focus the uses of storytelling as acknowledging/remembering experiences from childhood to adulthood, of personal stories that can also represent the shared experiences of a broader collective.

Unlike other conferences or gatherings, our Event proposes to step outside the traditional conference setting and offer opportunities for artists, photographers, practitioners, theorists, independent scholars, academics, performers, writers, and others to intermingle, providing platforms for interdisciplinary interactions that are fruitful and conducive to broadening horizons and sparking future projects, collaborations, and connections. We are excited to accept proposals for presentations, displays, exhibits, round tables, panels, interactive workshops and more. Below is an indicative but not exhaustive list of possible approaches, all of them residing at the point of connection between Storytelling and Trauma and Resistance and Remembering.

Read more and submit your proposal here.

Although COVID-19 has disrupted all forms of human mobility, including the closing of borders, and the halting of travel worldwide, according to the UN International Migration 2020 Highlights, growth in the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. According to the IOM, before the COVID-19 pandemic, international migrants, who made up 3.5 percent of the world’s population in 2019, contributed nearly 10 per cent of global GDP (roughly $ 6.7 trillion to global GDP). Moreover, according to the UNHCR, the persistence of extreme poverty in large areas of the world, the impacts of climate change, the continuation of internal conflicts, regional wars, and religious or sectarian inspired violence have forcibly displaced a record number of over 82.4 million people worldwide. At the same time, receiving and transit states keep closing their borders, forcing economic migrants and refugees to look for new routes and ways in search of a better life or a safe haven. Governments are struggling to balance their immigration and asylum policies between their obligations to uphold the fundamental human rights of migrants and the growing domestic pressures of xenophobic sentiments and nativist attitudes, including the increase in “white supremacist”, “far-right” or “extreme right-wing” groups around the world.

One thing is certain: international migrations will continue to increase and reshape the world as we know it. The way governments and societies decide to deal with the causes of migrations and their social, economic and political impacts will open new debates on redefining the existing international human rights instruments to protect the most vulnerable of our humanity.

Read more and submit your abstract here.

Travel, the daily movements of people (and animals), our mobility and ability to traverse spaces and places has been disrupted this last year and a half, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of us for whom travel was a frequent part of our lives have had to rethink how we approach it as we slowly begin to, once more, head to parts unknown – or to familiar and well-loved destinations.

Who gets to travel in today’s world? Has the pandemic widened the divide between those who can and those who can’t? What exactly does it mean to travel? Who travels where and why? What part does history play in the way we move amongst others and into others’ cultures? Do we take our cues from previous centuries and their navigation of illness and access? Or do we create brand new pathways through the world?

This inclusive interdisciplinary conference aims to map the broad boundaries of what is involved when we begin to grapple with travel as it has existed in the past, and today. We aim to explore the various interfaces which are created when people move, for whatever reasons, from place to place – and the differences created in just this last year and a half in what perhaps was, for many, a relatively straightforward process before. Has the pandemic had an effect that will last into the future? Will we choose different destinations? Will be choose different travel partners, restaurants, companies?

We will explore travel as a cultural phenomenon both in today’s world and the past, identify areas, issues and problems where reform is needed and consider potential pathways to the future with a view to having exciting and fruitful conversations, and creating a publication to engender further research, practice, collaboration and discussions.

Read more and submit your abstract here.