Call for Papers

International Conference, 26-27 January 2009
University of Luxembourg

The Local and the Global - Practices and Politics
of Historical Narrations and Negotiations

Organized by the University of Luxembourg, the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities (Oslo), the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD, Amsterdam).

There has been a growing awareness of ongoing processes of globalization, economic as well as cultural, over the last years. The increasing interrelatedness of social relations and cultural expressions and practices appears to have led to a blurring of traditional identities, values and orientations. Since these processes may be experienced as frightening and alienating, there have been serious counter-reactions to and rejections of them. The local seems to play an ambivalent role within these ongoing struggles for “rooted” identities, as it is connected to direct geographic experiences. However, the meaning and functions of the local are undergoing dramatic changes in the process of globalization. Local memories can represent the attempt to repel the threats of structural changes caused by anonymous agents. The local can be figured as a guarantee for social, normative and existential reassurance. But local memories can also be a mediator, which gives access to changing perceptions of the wider world order to discourses of global change and their universalistic interpretations.
This conference will discuss how cultural practices of representing and interpreting the past are being reshaped by interrelated processes of globalization, de/re-nationalization and localization in the long term. It will seek to address historical (dis)continuities concerning the connection of local memory cultures and global world orders throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Researchers from all disciplines are invited to participate: women and gender studies, museum studies, media and cultural studies, political sciences, philosophy, sociology, geography and history. Presentation of concrete case studies (especially from Norway, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) are welcome, as are more theoretical approaches of cultures of remembrance caught between the local and the global.
The relation between the local and the global still awaits further theoretical investigation: what is “the local” or the “locality”? Likewise, the “global” is very much a container term: what exactly is it that confronts the “local”?

The conference will be held at the University of Luxembourg, the travel expends of accepted speakers will be covered.

Please send proposals of up to 250 words for 20 minute duration papers to sonja.kmec@uni.lu
Accepted formats are Word and PDF. Please include also the following information: name, affiliation, contact details, and technical requirements.
Abstract submission deadline is 15th of September 2008.
Paper acceptance notification will be sent out by the 1st of October 2008.

Organizers:

• Claudia Lenz, senior researcher at the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo, Norway
• Madelon de Keizer, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD)
• Sonja Kmec, assistant-researcher at the University of Luxembourg, Research Unit IPSE (Identités, Politiques, Sociétés, Espaces), Luxembourg