July 1st and 2nd
Laws G.4, Laws Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

Conference Organizers:

N.B.: This conference is free to all those who wish to attend. To reserve a place, please contact Queen Mary’s Events Office (events@qmul.ac.uk).
Refreshments and meals will be provided to speakers only. Others attending the conference must make their own arrangements. However numerous options for reasonably priced meals and refreshments are available on campus and nearby.

This two-day conference celebrates the launch of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture (Intellect Publishers) based at the Centre for the Study of Migration. The conference will cover key thematic and theoretical areas that emerge from the nexus of migration and culture, when examined from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives. Speakers will interrogate questions of cultural migrancy, as well as of cultural identity and representation in the context of migration. Areas of theoretical enquiry will include borders, diaspora, cultural difference and cultural memory, transnational connections and hybridity from disciplines as diverse as Law, Medicine, Politics, English, Development Studies, Museum Studies, Film Studies, Gender Studies and Anthropology. The conference will further count on the participation of those working creatively in the culture industry on aspects of migration, so as to foment dialogue between the latter and the academy.

Keynote speakers are Professor Robin Cohen (Professor of Development Studies and Director, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford), Dr. Anne Kershen (Deputy-Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration, Queen Mary) and Professor Yosefa Loshitzky (Professor of Film and Media at the University of East London).

Invited artists include the photographer/activist/writer Shahidul Alam, founder/director of the Drik picture agency and of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as of Chobi Mela, the festival of photography in South Asia, as well as the poet, musician and performer Freddy Macha, singer and poet Sofía Buchuck, the poets Choman Hardi, Yang Lian, John Siddique, Stephen Watts, and the poets Mir Mahfuz Ali and Fathieh Saudi from Exiled Writers Ink. Shahidul Alam will show Under the Shade of the Banyan Tree, a short film that he made on migration and will offer a talk on his work on ‘Migrant Lives.’ The conference will end with a Poetry Fest, where the invited poets will offer readings and discussions of their work.

PROGRAME