PhD seminar and public lectures: Place in the Global South

Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS), University of Copenhagen
8-9 May 2014

Keynote speakers
Professor John Gledhill, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester
Professor Ursula Rao, Institute of Anthropology, Leipzig University

In recent decades, with increased scholarly attention to globalization and human mobility, place, both as a topic of investigation and as a conceptual framework, has gained a notable interest within the humanities and social sciences. People produce places by inscribing them with diverse content and meaning; emotions, historical and mythological events, political or religious ideologies. However, cultural, political, and development interventions embedded in certain power relations also produce places. Framed around two subthemes, this PhD seminar aims to examine how everyday practices, political processes and power relations produce places in the Global South. This seminar aims to bring together PhD students from various disciplines working on related themes.

Place, Power and Transculturation
Transculturation terms a process of selection, appropriation and transformation of cultural features in cross-cultural interactions, subtended by asymmetrical economic and political conditions. By considering how transculturation processes inscribe themselves in human settings we may pose questions such as; how are metropolitan modes of representation, ideas and visions of the nation exerted, received and negotiated outside the metropolis? How do competing ideas flow back?

Body and Place
How are places produced in relationship to bodies and vice versa? This part of the seminar aims to address the relationship between the production of places and bodies, their politics, imaginaries and materialities. In foucaultian sense, bodies are produced, ordered, managed and disciplined in certain spaces. Yet, we might also think of connection between bodies and places through everyday practices, embodiment and emplacement.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION: The course is free of charge. Participants will be selected on the basis of their application file and field of research. The selected participants are asked to organize travel and accommodation at their own expense.

Venue: Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.

Requirements: Mandatory readings and active participation in seminar discussions. Participants are further encouraged to present a paper.

Application: CV, PhD abstract (max. 250 words) and paper abstract (max 250 words).

Deadline for submission of applications is 31 March, 2014. Deadline for submission of paper (5 pages) is 25 April.

3,0 ECTS for participation with a presentation during the seminar.
0,6 ECTS for participation without a presentation.