Gender, the Refugee and Displacement (1900-1950)

Newcastle University, Friday 5^th July 2013

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Professor Peter Gatrell (Manchester University)

 

Call For Papers: This interdisciplinary one-day symposium will interrogate the links between gender and displacement from the turn of the twentieth century, through both World Wars and into the post-war period. Addressing a crucial gap in scholarship surrounding displacement and gender within the critical canon of war studies, it asks how gender influences or impacts displacement during this period and how, in particular, men and women experience and represent displacement differently?  It interrogates the historic association of the refugee with the female, existing outside the symbolic order and beyond the nation, particularly at times of war (Plain, 1994). It addresses the embodied experience of displacement, such as the tendency for refugees and Internally Displaced People to experience rape, torture and physical violence as well as other forms of emotional or physical hardship, as well as the representation of displacement in literary, biographical and historical works with relation to ideas around gender and empowerment. In particular, this conference brings together academics working across the disciplines, looking at the intersections between gender and displacement in a range of discourses legal and historical, literary and political, artistic and geographical in and around the early to mid-twentieth century. It welcomes abstracts from across the humanities and social sciences.

Papers are invited on any aspect of gender and displacement during this period, including but not exclusive to:

·         Male/female experiences of displacement;

·         Male/female descriptions or representations of displacement;

·         Childhood and displacement;

·         The politics of displacement/ power and displacement;

·         The experiences of IDPs and refugees;

·         Race and displacement;

·         Histories/geographies of displacement;

·         Theories of displacement;

·         The UN Convention on Refugees and the legal aspects of displacement.

Please send 300 word abstracts to Katherine Cooper ([log in to unmask]) before 1st May 2013.

For more information see: http://genderanddisplacementconf.wordpress.com/

This conference is supported by a generous grant from Newcastle University’s Gender Research Group.