How Does Culture Move?
Mobility and Stasis in Global Cultural History
A symposium hosted by
the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics and the Humanities Research Institute
at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
October 29-30, 2021
Hybrid mode: in-person and via Zoom
This symposium will examine how culture moves and circulates: across space, time, material conditions, technologies and affects. We will consider how movement shapes and reshapes the cultural domain, creating new relationships between people, objects and practices. How does movement shape a community’s perception of local space and cultural identity? Conversely, what happens with the meaning of objects, paradigms, practices, when they are anchored or moored; when they become static? We seek to bring together cultural scholars, working in different contexts to engage in critical reflection on mobility and stasis, as well as the global-local. We will focus particularly on approaches and modes of scholarship that de-center dominant paradigms in relation to how “the world” has been conceived as well investigating the conditions that determine the inertial and accelerative aspects of cultural movement.
Topics will include the circulation of material goods, concepts and bodies; object itineraries; travel, mobilization; migration, multilingualism, and language use; place and placelessness; technologies of mobility; affects in motion; heritage; knowledge production; layered identities.