Call for paper proposals
Symposium: “Art and Geopolitical Borders: contested sovereignty and artistic practice”
Manchester School of Art, November 19, 2015
Deadline: Jul 1, 2015
In recent years there has been a growth of interest in the ways that
art practice can both acknowledge and articulate the issues around
geo-political borders. Borders have long functioned as a vital
component of state-formation and nation building, a role that continues
within the shifting politics of globalisation. Their significance is
thus subject to ongoing redefinition through a dynamic between a
repressive politics of containment and attempts to challenge this.
Within these zones of contestation, relationships between geographies
and power become both clearly visible and subject to dispute. And
although this functions on one level in terms of collective experience,
the effects on individuals can also be destructive and traumatic.
Recently there has been an upsurge in art practices that visualise the
tensions and contradictions arising from contemporary borders. However
art can also function as a means of disruption and intervention within
the established operations and normative meanings of border
technologies, and as a site of reparation, where traumatic histories
can be negotiated in turn. This one day symposium attempts to address
these and related issues.
Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:
• Mapping borders
• Trans-border cultures
• Gender politics and borders
• Trauma and memory
• The political contestation/vacillation of borders
• Border fortification
• Migration, bodies, and borders
• Conflict sites around borders
• Curatorship of border tourism and conflict tourism
Please send an abstract by 1 July 2015 of no more than 300 words and a
short biography to one of the organising panel: Fionna Barber
f.barber@mmu.ac.uk; Simon Faulkner s.faulkner@mmu.ac.uk; Beccy Kennedy
b.m.kennedy@mmu.ac.uk
Selected papers from the symposium will be published in an edited
collection.
