Speakers & abstracts

Keynote speakers

Ien Ang (Univ. Western Sydney)
'Intercultural dialogue without guarantees'

Postcolonial translocations, past and present, have turned most Western nation-states into irrevocably hybrid, multicultural and transnational formations, where the idea of an time-honoured and shared "national culture" is constantly put under erasure even as its rightous prevalence is still passionately and powerfully asserted. Debates about 'integration', 'social cohesion' and 'national values' articulate the intrinsic contradiction of this current condition. To respond to, and live with, the complex fallout of this intrinsic contradiction we need to cultivate a cosmopolitan multiculturalism without resorting to teleological myths of unity: instead, we need to enter into an ongoing practice of 'intercultural dialogue without guarantees'.

Diana Brydon (Univ. Manitoba)
'"Difficult forms of knowing": Enquiry, injury and translocated relations of postcolonial responsibility'

Download the abstract here.

Edward W. Soja (Univ. of California, Los Angeles)
'Postcolonial Spaces and the Struggle over Geography'

Speakers

Click here to download the conference abstracts.