End Date :
Maison Francaise
This conference aims to establish a critical transdisciplinary dialogue to reflect upon the representations, ethics and material consequences of travel and the various ways in which modalities of travel simultaneously reinstate and violate notions of border and cartography – spatial, social, economic, legal, artistic, political or epistemological. What are the distinct types of travel? In what ways are travel and its ethics represented? How does travel condition boundaries and vice versa? How has media and popular literature affected our relationship to travel and the recording/archiving of it? How are categories such as identity, subjectivity, and sovereignty inscribed (negatively or positively) in the act of travel?
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following areas of inquiry:
Travel literature, travel and literature, literature as travel, and all permutations thereof
Pilgrimage, religious or otherwise
Travel as enlightenment
Travel and its relation to the global market
Utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias
Borders and border-crossing, pre-empting of or accounting for travel
Borderlessness, statelessness and exception
Migration/immigration/emigration; forced and voluntary
Ethnography and fieldwork; discovery, evolution
Travel and identity, conceptions of self
Technologies of travel; vessels and containerization
Tourism: economic impacts of travel as a leisure activity; stratifications of travel; commercial travel, spectacle; eco-tourism
Museums and the objects of travel
Virtual travel, through video, documentary, gaming, etc
Time travel, the recording of time and history
Travel theory
