Call for Papers – Negotiating Displacement: New Perspectives and Connections in War, Migration and Refugee Studies’

(extended CfP available at www.niod.nl)

This conference aims at connecting research on war, mass violence and genocide with migration studies in order to deepen the dialogue between two disciplines that often look at similar phenomena but from different perspectives.

The conference’s guiding question is how displacement has been negotiated with regard to trajectories and status by individuals and groups from the First World War to the present in a global perspective.

We encourage historicizing and multidisciplinary perspectives that investigate displaced persons’ agency, room for maneuver and possibilities for creating their own social and cultural spaces within the limited and often harsh social, economic, and political parameters. We wish to understand the dynamics surrounding these processes.

The academic conference day will be preceded by a public event the day before inviting people from various backgrounds to engage in and reflect on the topic of Negotiating Displacement through interactive theatre. Conference attendants are invited to join this day as well.

For the academic conference we invite contributions that relate to three themes connected to Negotiating Displacement: Citizenship, cultural identities, and methodological approaches.

• Citizenship: looking into the ways in which displaced people face issues of citizenship, as both a legal as well as a social phenomenon, and concerning the original citizenship and the newly aspired citizenship. Relevant sub-issues are: statelessness, the position of minority groups and internally displaced persons (including issues like official amnesia and discouragement of acknowledging domestic refugee crises), and coping strategies.
• Cultural identities: exploring how displacement shapes processes of identity (trans-)formation in formal and informal social networks. We are particularly interested in the role and position of family, gender, class, ethnicity and ‘race’, political ideologies, and religion.
• Methodology: displacement and how people and groups negotiate their way through it invite us to rethink questions of methodology, cross-disciplinary approaches, and knowledge production in general. We especially invite contributions that link quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The conference will consist of three panels, introduced by three brief keynote speeches (20 minutes each). The panels will have three contributors, speaking 20 minutes each, and one discussant. Before the lunch break MA and PhD students will give brief pitches of related research projects; during the break the posters can be visited.

The organizers hope to receive paper proposals (max. 300 words) connected to the three main themes mentioned above, before April 14 2019. Proposals should come with a brief CV of the sender. Those selected will be notified before May 14 2019. Depending on the amount of financial support the organizers will be able to muster, expenses for travel and stay for speakers may be partly reimbursed.

For more information: see the extended CfP at www.niod.nl or contact the organizers via the Secretary of NIOD’s Research Department Helen Koekenbier, email: h.koekenbier@niod.knaw.nl