Conference Program "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity", June 23-24-25, 2021, Online

Laura Popa Announcement
Location
Germany
Subject Fields
Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Digital Humanities, Nationalism History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

The international, interdisciplinary laboratory conference “Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity” will take place online on June 23-24-25, 2021 at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen, Germany. The deadline for registration is June 16, 2021.

The 21st Century is a time of cultural and social acceleration (Rosa, 2013), which continuously shapes physical limits by updating socio-cultural dynamics in the hybrid form of overlapping, blending and mixing of cultural identities. The novel COVID-19 pandemic highlights this global dimension by provoking an even faster digitalization of all spheres of life and forming new cultural hierarchies through disparities in technological development and economic resources. Is this crisis one of the examples that show how cultural hybridity can be reconceptualised in theoretical discourses and social practice? In this laboratory-conference, we look for a more concrete, differentiated and nuanced understanding of cultural hybridity, stressing the need for a critique of the concept and its harmonious connotations. We aim to explore new ways to overcome the essentialization and commodification of cultural hybridity that has been taking place in the last decades in the global world. In this way, we encourage new meanings, action-oriented concepts in a broader discussion about localization, translation and digitalization of cultural identities in our interconnected global world. From the local to the global, cultural hybridity nowadays travels across the individual, political, religious, biological, cultural and virtual spaces in the historical contexts of nation-state, transnationalism and globalisation. Hence, hybridity can entangle new meanings and action-oriented concepts. This conference aims to reframe the discourse on hybridity by exploring this cultural artefact in theory and social practice and as a still useful analytical tool in the study of culture.

Contact Email
Laura.Popa@gcsc.uni-giessen.de