Exploring the Portuguese Diaspora in InterDISCIPLINARY and Comparative Perspectives: An International Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS
http://ocs.sfu.ca/pds/index.php/pdaip/2013
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Exploring the Portuguese Diaspora in InterDISCIPLINARY and Comparative Perspectives: An International Conference
July 25-27, 2013
Indianapolis – Indiana, USA

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Irene Maria F. Blayer (Brock University, Canada), Teresa Cid (University of Lisbon, Portugal), Francisco Cota Fagundes (UMass Amherst, USA), Dulce Maria Scott (Anderson University, USA)

The Portuguese diaspora is in a state of flux throughout the world. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants of bygone days continue to integrate and assimilate into the societies adopted by their parents while the language, culture, and country of their ancestry fade into the distant recesses of their memory. In a world molded by fast-changing communication technologies and transnational movements, the old and the new intertwine within the spaces of the past, the present, and the future. Out of this sense of being a part of time of continuous change, a discursive construction of the contemporaneous Portuguese diaspora fosters a reflection upon the interfaces between the country of origin and its global diasporic spaces. We ought to challenge the way we study and write about our diaspora, especially when we have entered a period of reconstruction and regeneration in which we seek new forms of collaborative frameworks and interdisciplinary knowledge.
Exploring the Portuguese Diaspora in InterDISCIPLINARY and Comparative Perspectives: An International Conference brings together the synergetic efforts of colleagues from universities in the United States, Canada and Portugal. In collaboration with this conference, Neither Here nor There, Yet Both: International Conference on the Luso-American Experience will take place at the University of Lisbon (July 11-13, 2013).
The Indiana conference Exploring the Portuguese Diaspora in InterDISCIPLINARY and Comparative Perspectives proposes to create a forum that will permit scholars to engage in a cross-national and cross-disciplinary dialogue that will generate valuable comparative frameworks and data. The deadline for receiving abstracts (500 words) for a 20-min. paper, panel proposals and a concise bio is February 28, 2013. Notification of acceptance will be sent out on March 25, 2013. All proposals must be submitted via the online system at the conference link http://ocs.sfu.ca/pds/index.php/pdaip/2013. Papers may be presented in any of the following languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French. A selection of the papers presented will be published in a refereed volume.
All comparative and interdisciplinary forms of lusophone diaspora will be considered: sociological, economic, political, literary, linguistic, historical, cultural, and others. Possible themes include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Diaspora theory and the Portuguese “diaspora”
• Historical trends and aspects of the Portuguese diaspora
• The geography of the Portuguese diaspora by countries and continents
• Diasporas and home country socio-cultural, political, and economic interactions
• Diasporas, globalization, and international/transnational relations
• Return migrations, new transits and new migrations, transnational identity formation
• Diasporas in the digital age
• The media and the diaspora
• Demographic, social, educational, economic, and political trends in diaspora communities
• Socioeconomic, political, cultural and psychological integration across the generations in immigrant receiving societies.
• Diaspora and intercultural patterns
• Cultural, artistic, literary, and linguistic trends in the diaspora
• Material culture (e.g.: artifacts, monuments, letters) and non-material culture (religion, values, norms, feasts, folklore, traditions, music)
• Identity formation processes, family structures, and psychological aspects of migrations and diasporas
• Diaspora and children: language, emotion, and identity
• Writing the diaspora
• Language in contact with other languages, language change and variation; notions of bilingualism and multilingualism; the ancestral language across the generations
• Oral vs. written narratives: Portuguese migrant stories (life stories and other narratives)
• Identity and collective memory discourse; autobiography
• Linguistic issues and gender
• Context and culture in language learning
• Speech community and representation of discourse
• Translation
• Diaspora and creative writing
• Comparative diaspora studies
• Other aspects of the Portuguese diaspora