International symposium
Transnational solidarity and visual culture: resistance and revolutionary memories from WWII to the the Cold War
Université Grenoble Alpes, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 24 & 25 June, 2019
Call for Papers deadline: January 20, 2019
This international symposium aims to open up an innovative field of research on transnational solidarity movements crisscrossing cultural history and visual culture. This approach seeks to explore the role of visual culture as a transnational vehicle for collective dissent and consciousness, and its agency in shaping social movements through international networks of resistance.
We propose a framework that transcends national boundaries and connects movements, ideologies and practices between the Southern and Northern hemispheres. Indeed, despite apparent differences between geographical contexts, visual production developed by, or in connection with, solidarity movements, and can thus be considered as part of a transnational culture of resistance across Western, Eastern European and Third World geographies.
This symposium therefore aims to provide a deterritorialized mapping of solidarity movements in order to understand the connections between politically radical practices and a visual culture of resistance. This mapping is necessary to expose a history of transnational solidarity movements where visual and performative practices were central to a politics of solidarity and resistance. Important to this analysis will hence be a consideration of visual culture as social practice, and visual culture as social action.
We invite doctoral students, young researchers, and established scholars whose work intersects visual and artistic practices with the politics and cultural history of solidarity movements from WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are particularly interested in papers that explore processes of transfer and exchange, focusing on networks and the circulation of images, people (artists, film directors, photographers) and ideologies. The symposium seeks to show how these networks shaped a transnational visual culture of resistance while adapting to its local contexts and political struggles. Other important questions we would like to consider are:
How is political activism channelled/mediated/advanced through visual and performative practices?
Can we think of an aesthetics of solidarity, or, an aesthetics of resistance?
What are the potentials and challenges of mechanisms of resistance: public interventions, print media, posters, affiches, cinema, photography?
What are the challenges of collaboration?
How does activism respond and contributes to the politization of public space?
Submission and presentation guidelines
The official languages of the conference will be English and French. Please be aware that all the participants will have to submit a finished version of their papers by the 31st of May.
Please submit a 500 words abstract including a 200 words bio in one PDF document, and a two-page CV as a separate PDF. Send your proposal no later than the 20th of January to: Fabiola Martinez (fabiola.martinez.1@slu.edu) and Paula Barreiro (paula.barreiro-lopez@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr). Use as our subject: Proposal_Transnational Solidary and Visual Culture.
All submissions will be reviewed by the members of the scientific committee, and results announced by the end of February.
Scientific Committee:
Paula Barreiro López (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Juliane Debeusscher (Universitat de Barcelona)
Olga Fernández López (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Jacopo Galimberti (University of Manchester)
Sonia Kerfa (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez (Saint Louis University, Madrid)
Jaime Vindel (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Organizers may be able to provide some financial support to participants pending on the approval of funds currently being sought.
See the CFP in French
