Crossing Boundaries: Language, Culture, and Migration Symposium
Symposium Dates: 28-29 November 2019
Time: 8:00am – 5:00pm
Venue: The University of Queensland (St Lucia Campus)
The University of Queensland’s School of Languages and Cultures is hosting a symposium entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Language, Culture, and Migration from the 28th-29th November 2019.
The symposium is co-hosted by the Translation and Interpreting and Cultural Studies researchers in the School of Languages and Cultures at UQ. Presentations will run for 1.5 days with a half-day workshop in sub-clusters to provide feedback and to plan for publications. There will also be an evening reception and poetry reading by Hiromi Itō.
The symposium will explore multilingual and multicultural texts, films, art, the classroom, and daily lives, and to understand these spaces in terms of “transcultural” or “translanguaging” practices. By bringing together scholars of diverse fields of study and diverse language and cultural disciplines, we hope to elucidate the powers and pitfalls of translanguaging.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
- Professor Hiromi Itō, an internationally acclaimed Japanese poet who has won a number of prestigious literary awards since the late 1970s. She spent two decades in the USA before returning to Japan, where she is Professor of literature at Waseda University. She has appeared in numerous international poetry festivals, conferences, and workshops.
- Associate Professor Natalie Edwards (The University of Adelaide) who is an expert in translanguaging in Francophone migrant women’s writing. She is author and editor of many books and is currently leading an ARC Discovery Grant entitled “Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia.”
- Associate Professor Alison Levine (University of Virginia), an expert in documentary who publishes on nation, space and boundaries. Her books include Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary and Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France.
- Emeritus Professor Catherine Wihtol de Wenden (SciencesPo Paris), a political scientist and expert on European citizenship and migration who has recently published on memory of immigration and immigrant memory. Co-funded by the French Embassy and Alliance Française.
As this conference is being held at the University of Queensland, those who are interested may also wish to attend the CSAA’s Cultural Transformations Conference, which is being held in early December. For further details please visit the conference’s official website here.
Hiromi Ito Poetry Reading
Registration and Full Details here
Dates: Thursday 28 November 2019
Time: 6:00pm – 7:30pm (Registration from 5:45pm)
Venue: Forgan Smith Building (#1), room SE302; The University of Queensland (St Lucia Campus).
ITŌ Hiromi (a.k.a. Hiromi Itō) is one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary poets with an extensive range of border-crossing and travel experiences. Since the late 1970s she has published prolifically and received a number of major literary awards including Gendai Shi Techō Prize (1978), Noma Literary Prize (1999), Takami Jun Prize (2006), Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize (2007), Izumi Shikibu Prize (2008), Waseda University Tsubouchi Shōyō Award (2015), and most recently Taneda Santōka Prize (2019). Her works have been translated into English (e.g. Killing Kanoko and Wild Grass on a Riverbank), German (Mutter töten. Gedichte und Prosa) and other languages. Besides poetry, fiction and essays, she has published a number of translations from English and classical Japanese in genres ranging from children’s stories to folktales and plays.
Film Screening: Between Fences: (Entre les frontières) by Avi Mograbi
Dates: Wednesday 27 November 2019
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA; Gallery of Modern Art, Stanley Pl, South Brisbane
This event is held in conjunction with the “Crossing Boundaries: Language, Culture and Migration Symposium” organised by the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland with presenting partner the Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA. This is also part of “France Australian Conversations” program funded by the French Embassy and Alliance Française.
Between Fences (2016) follows African asylum seekers held in the Negev Refugee Centre in Israel. Through a theatre workshop, the participants question the status of refugees and what compelled them to leave behind their possessions to plunge into the unknown.
The film is in Hebrew, Tigrigna, and Arabic with English subtitles. This is a free event, no registration required.
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