CONFERENCE AND JOURNAL LAUNCH: Crossings - The Nexus of Migration and Culture

I received the following announcement about a conference and journal launch linked to Queen Mary (London)'s Centre for the Study of Migration:

CROSSINGS: THE NEXUS OF MIGRATION AND CULTURE
July 1st and 2nd 2010
Law Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

This two-day conference celebrates the launch of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture (Intellect Publishers) based at the Centre for the Study of Migration. The conference will cover key thematic and theoretical areas that emerge from the nexus of migration and culture, when examined from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives. Speakers will interrogate questions of cultural migrancy, as well as of cultural identity and representation in the context of migration.

Areas of theoretical enquiry will include borders, diaspora, cultural difference and cultural memory, transnational connections and hybridity from disciplines as diverse as Law, Medicine, Politics, English, Development Studies, Museum Studies, Film Studies, Gender Studies and Anthropology. The conference will further count on the participation of those working creatively in the culture industry on aspects of migration, so as to foment dialogue between the latter and the academy.

Conference Organizers:
- Professor Parvati Nair (Director, Centre for the Study of Migration)
- Dr Omar García-Obregón (Reader in Poetics of Exile, Censorship and Cultural Resistance)

Keynote speakers:
- Professor Robin Cohen (Professor of Development Studies and Director, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford)
- Dr. Anne Kershen (Deputy-Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration, Queen Mary)
- Professor Yosefa Loshitzky (Professor of Film and Media at the University of East London).

Invited artists:
- Poets, including: Choman Hardi, John Siddique
- Photographer/artist/curator: Shahidul Alam, founder/director of the Drik picture agency and of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as of Chobi Mela, the festival of photography in South Asia. Shahidul Alam will show Under the Shade of the Banyan Tree, a short film that he made on migration and will offer a talk on his work on ?Migrant Lives.?
- The conference will end with a Poetry Fest, where the invited poets will offer readings and discussions of their work.

Please note that to enable us to make the conference free, we can only offer refreshments and meals to the speakers. Others attending can find many good-quality, reasonably-priced options on and around the campus.

If you will need to stay over, the Queen Mary University website offers some information on accommodation in the area. A list of hotels is available at http://www.residences.qmul.ac.uk/alternative//hotels/index.html

There is also information about other options in the area at: http://www.residences.qmul.ac.uk/

Please do get in touch if you have other questions.

Tendayi Bloom,PhD student, School of Law
Research Associate, Centre for the Study of Migration Queen Mary University of London
http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/people/research/bloom.html