Travelling between the Centre and Periphery: Creating a Feminist Dialogue for the Diaspora

Friday 11th July 2014, University of Warwick

Keynote speaker: Professor Miriam Cooke (Duke University)

*REGISTRATION EXTENDED TO MONDAY 7th JULY*

Registration is £15, or £10 to students/Warwick staff; please complete the form on their website and return it no later than Monday 7th July to the address given.

General enquiries can be directed to the organisers at travelmobilitynetwork@gmail.com

About the conference:

In recent years, discussions of travel narratives have examined the creation of the diaspora, highlighting themes of loss and exile using the centre-periphery framework. This symposium seeks to develop discussions through a focus on feminism in travel narratives, examining how centre-periphery discourses are complicated, challenged, subverted, or reinforced through gendered accounts of migration, ethnicity, identity conflicts and political connections.The Symposium will explore how migration and diaspora formations are gendered to develop a centre-periphery narrative which juxtaposes traditional and conventional discourses often associated with the marginalised experience.

Questions to be addressed include: how does travel through forced or voluntary migration create new opportunities to liberate or oppress women? How do women of different socio-cultural and historical locations/parameters formulate their relationship to feminism? Papers have alsp been invited to reflect anew on the “centre” and “periphery”. Where (if anywhere) are they located and what is at stake in mapping these spaces today? What does peripheral status imply? How can we re-imagine the centre-periphery dynamic for the current age?