Travelling in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin America
                                                       
                                                      School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, 
                
                                                         and Institute of Modern Languages Research

                                                                  (deadline: 7th September 2018)


CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Dr Claire Lindsay (University College London, UK), and Dr Daniel Noemi Voionmaa (Northeastern University, Boston, USA)

We invite proposals for papers for a conference on travelling and travel writings, to be held at the University of Bristol, 4th-5th October 2018.

During the last decade the arts, humanities and social sciences have undergone what has been labelled a ‘mobilities turn’ (Urry, 2007): movement and mobility have been described as constitutive of social, cultural, economic and political relations, that is, as what is stable within contemporary societies. This makes travelling and the act of moving a central issue in contemporary everyday life on an almost worldwide scale, and Latin America is clearly not the exception. 

The role of technology and an accelerated globalisation in the last decades of the twentieth and in the early twenty-first centuries, have contributed significantly to questions of mobility in Latin America and elsewhere. Here, the flux of people has encouraged an exchange of fictional and non-fictional narratives provided by, among others, writers, journalists, travellers, and ethnographers, whose ideas have played a fundamental role in understanding contemporary life, and socio-political and cultural contexts in Latin America from a subjective point of view. These ‘travel narratives’, as Claire Lindsay (2010) calls them, have captured the time and space of people’s everyday lives, demonstrating how travelling has become an excellent means to delve into and reflect on global issues from local and subjective perspectives.

This conference seeks to explore narratives linked to travel and mobility in contemporary Latin America. The conference aims to contribute to the understanding of the social, historical and cultural impact and relevance of movement within, from and to this region. Through the exploration of personal travel accounts, the aim here is to create an interdisciplinary dialogue that brings together scholars coming from multiple disciplines, thus extending research expertise and knowledge of travel narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The conference welcomes contributions from those working on fictional and non-fictional texts (testimony, personal diary, chronicles, personal letters, ethnographic and auto-ethnographic work), focusing on the following themes:
 
1)	Women and travelling
2)	Travelling and identity 
3)	Rural and urban questions
4)	Global and local phenomena
5)	Travelling and materiality
6)	Travelling and cultural contact and exchange

Abstracts for twenty-minute papers should be sent to [log in to unmask], Dr Barbara Castillo ([log in to unmask]) and/or Ms Isidora Urrutia ([log in to unmask]) by no later than 7th September. They should be no longer than 300 words, including 3 keywords. Please contact us if you have any queries. The conference programme and registration information will be made available on 1st September 2018. 

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the GEOHUMANITIES-FORUM list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=GEOHUMANITIES-FORUM&A=1