Panel sessions at the 18th IMISCOE Annual Conference, Luxembourg, July 7-9, 2021
The DIVCULT Standing Committee aims to contribute to the 18th IMISCOE Annual Conference ‘Crossing borders, connecting cultures’ with the following panel proposals:
1. Counting and Accounting for Immigrant Cultures
In this panel, we would like to ask questions about the counting and accounting for immigrant cultures on three levels: as a practical problem, as a methodological challenge, and as a theoretical predicament. Does the accounting and counting of immigrant culture co-produce immigrant vulnerabilities? What counts as culture when immigrants are concerned? How do governments quantify immigrant cultures? What gets counted? What is left out? We are inviting a range of suggestions to understand how immigrant cultures have been made amenable for analysis, what inclusions and exclusions of cultural phenomena have been made, and how governmental practices have brightened or dimmed cultural boundaries. We are hoping to attract papers, research proposals, opinion pieces, and provocations of all kinds.
Please send your proposal (title, 250-word abstract, name, affiliation and email) by 27 November to: Berndt Clavier, Malmö University,
2. Cultural Ritualized city Events and the Inclusion of Newcomers
This session is co-organized by DIVCULT and by UNIC, a Belgian-Swiss research project whose main objective is to analyze the self-organization of migrant associations, independent civil society initiatives and established ritualized practices of inclusion in the city that occur outside formal migration and integration policies and that improve the dynamics of belonging, exchange, cooperation and interactions between the established and newcomers. One of the objectives of the research is to assess how cities’ ritualized urban events, memory and values contribute to the inclusion of newcomers.
In this session, we propose more specifically to examine to what extent ritualized urban cultural, artistic and sport events offer opportunities of inclusion to newcomers or alternatively to what extent those events produce or reproduce their exclusion from the city social fabric. We welcome empirical and theoretical papers examining how cities deal with that question. The events we are interested in are city parades, carnivals, annual historical celebrations, music festivals, football derbies, etc.
Please send your proposal (title, 250-word abstract, name, affiliation and email) by 27 November to: Marco Martiniello, University of Liège,
3. Inequalities and the arts
This panel aims at gathering presentations of data and analysis from empirically-based research conducted in different European and non-European contexts, and focusing on a wide range of art practices and groups of populations. The objective of this panel is twofold. First, it aims at understanding which inequalities still operate in the art domain with regard to migrants/people with migrant background/people belonging or assigned to cultural minorities. Inequalities may concern, among other topics: the access to culture, both as consumers, producers and managers of culture; gender issues; processes of racialisation on the stage (or in the recruitment phase) and related processes of exclusion; stereotypes, including those that represent these people as lacking cultural capital and needing to be targeted by specific policies to foster their cultural participation. Second, this panel aims at studying how these inequalities as well as the different forms of cultural hegemony that lie behind them are challenged by the concerned people/artists through, for example: bottom-up initiatives of cultural participation/artistic production; the performance of (specific aspects of) ethnicity; explicit acts of resistance and/or advocacy initiatives, etc.
Please send your proposal (title, 250-word abstract, name, affiliation and email) by 27 November to: Elsa Mescoli, University of Liège,
In case you are interested and available to act as co-chair or discussant for any of the panels, send an email to:
Please kindly send your abstract and/or expression of interest for being co-chair or discussant by 27 November at the latest. We will notify the acceptance of your proposal by 30 November.