2nd ASSE International Conference on British and American Studies

Nation, nationality, nationhood: What's in a name? 2-4 May 2013 Tiranë, Albania

Albanian Society for the Study of English (ASSE) in collaboration with the English School of Canadian Institute of Technology are pleased to announce the Second ASSE International Conference on British and American Studies:

Nation, nationality, nationhood: What’s in a name?

The conference will be held from 02 - 04 May 2013 in Tirana.

Please visit the conference website (http://www.assenglish.org/nation/) for more information.

Often defined in terms of commonness of culture, language, history, ethnicity, religion and spirit, the terms nation, nationhood, nationality seem to have become distant at a time when globalization, multiculturalism, intercultural or cross-cultural communication define the way we live with respect to ourselves, the others and the environment on the whole.

Although the terms are commonly used and defined by those who work in the field of Political Science, still they have been employed and have found expression in art, literature, history, sociology and many other social and cultural disciplines. The terms have usually become more emphatic in times of hardships for a country, especially during foreign invasion. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori once summoned together people of different age and background to defend one’s country and culture.

Despite this, this sense of commonness as defined above is hard to maintain in present day society, when social, economic, demographic, technological and other developments take place in an eye shut. The exchange of cultures, the erasure of borders and boundaries have given way to a globalized world in which all cultures negotiate. Thus, in the present society a new feeling of commonness appears to define nation, nationality and nationhood.

We invite scholars to join us in the reconsideration of these concepts and hope to provide an intriguing ground for new perspectives and definitions of these concepts in the twenty-first century context.

 

Some possible topics the conference aims at addressing include:

(Re)constructions of nationhood and national identity: past, present and  future
Representations of nationhood in art, literature, history and the media
How do you respond to the principle “One nation, One state”?
Utopia and dystopia: how different, how similar?
National identity, national minority, national stereotypes
Race, ethnicity, nationality, and language
Self and the Other in the present-day nation
Nationalism: how good, how bad?
Interacting cultures: Diversity and harmony
Disintegrating cultures:  victimization, oppression and racism
Theories of nation-building
National heroes, myths and legends: uphold or debunk?
Spatial and temporal representations of nation and nationality


Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to:

British and Commonwealth Literature
American Literature
Literary Theory
Literary Criticism
Cultural Studies
Intercultural Communication
Communication Studies
Media Studies
Discourse Analysis
Pragmatics
Linguistics
Semiotics
Translation Studies
Applied Linguistics


The conference language is English. Please send your abstracts (about 250 words) for papers (20 min) as an MS word attachment to the following Email-address by 31 January 2013:

nation@assenglish.org

Posted by Ilaria Parini on 4th Nov 2012
in Call for Papers

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