How Does Culture Move?
Mobility and Stasis in Global Cultural History

October 29-30, 2021

A symposium hosted by
the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics and the Humanities Research Institute
at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Hybrid mode: sessions will be held simultaneously in-person and via Zoom
The in-person sessions for this symposium will take place in Room 108 of the Levis Faculty Center (919 W Illinois St, Urbana, IL 61801).

This symposium will examine how culture moves and circulates: across space, time, material conditions, technologies and affects. We will consider how movement shapes and reshapes the cultural domain, creating new relationships between people, objects and practices. How does movement shape a community’s perception of local space and cultural identity? Conversely, what happens with the meaning of objects, paradigms, practices, when they are anchored or moored; when they become static? We’ve brought together cultural scholars, working in different contexts to engage in critical reflection on mobility and stasis, as well as the global-local. We will focus particularly on approaches and modes of scholarship that de-center dominant paradigms in relation to how “the world” has been conceived, as well as investigating the conditions that determine the inertial and accelerative aspects of cultural movement. Participants will include outside speakers, as well as faculty and graduate students from our campus.

Topics will include the circulation of material goods, concepts and bodies; object itineraries; travel, mobilization; migration, multilingualism, and language use; place and placelessness; technologies of mobility; affects in motion; heritage; knowledge production; layered identities

If you would like to download the poster for this symposium, please click here.