Themed sessions: 

Announcement and CFP

Session 1: Culture, politics, and the future

Session organiser: 
Ana Isabel Lopes


At the beginning of the 21st century, we are grappling with political and economic contexts whose paradoxes are often difficult to reason out, and which seem to hinder the task Williams set up for cultural studies in its articulation with the experimental work developed within adult education: ‘In its most general bearings, this work remained a kind of intellectual analysis which wanted to change the actual developments of society’. What sort of changes can we effect when, as Bourdieu reminds us, the utopia of neo-liberalism, turned into a political programme, has enforced a system of relations of domination which, mediated by networks of rules and regulations, escapes ‘the grasp of individual consciousness’? What are the mechanisms behind the dominant strategy of reducing the causes for the workers’ experience of uncertainty and distress to the inexorable unfolding of the economy? How does the mapping of the politically produced relations which structure our life enable us to think the future?

This session invites reflections upon these and other issues concerning the relationship between culture, politics and modes of (re)thinking the future.


Session 2: Englishness and ‘Englishnesses’: the politics of the past

Session organiser:
Sofia Sampaio

The debate over a distinct English identity – variously dubbed “the English spirit” (J. B. Priestley, 1934), “the soul of England” (Philipp Gibbs, 1935), “the English character” (C. F. G. Masterman, 1909), or, more recently, ‘Englishness’ – has been specially heated in moments of national crisis, uncertainty or impending change. Industrialisation, urbanisation, the set-up and subsequent break-up of the British Empire all registered, in different ways, the need to re-assess and/or re-assert what it means to be English. Though lacking a fixed, final form, Englishness appears to draw on a reasonably stable repertoire of images, narratives, collective memories and experiences, whose hard core, according to Krishan Kumar, was already established by the end of the nineteenth century (Kumar, 2001). As a consequence, it has been a quality of Englishness to be perceived as homogenous and deeply rooted in the past, while remaining open to constant updating (its appeal across the political spectrum – from Winston Churchill to George Orwell, from Margaret Thatcher and John Major to Tony Blair – has been frequently noted). 
This session is interested in papers that propose to address Englishness in terms of its problematical negotiations between past and present, tradition and modernity, continuity and discontinuity. How are particular ideas of the nation created and made to circulate in everyday cultural practices? How are these meanings and symbolic practices received, recycled, and re-shaped by artists, writers, politicians, the media, sportspeople, public institutions, and private corporations? In other words, how are old and new versions of Englishness being (re)constructed, drawn together, opposed to and engaged with in today’s fast-changing world? Finally, given internal pressures, from urban multiculturalism and recent devolution, and external ones, from Europe, globalisation, and American culture, what is there to be expected from Englishness in the future?


Session 3: Humanist photography: culture, society, visuality

Session organiser:
Álvaro Pina


In recent years, exhibitions, publications and on the whole a growing interest in photography and visual culture have brought humanist photography to the focus of renewed theoretical and critical attention. In connection with the exhibition of photographs by an international artist being organised for the 2nd International ‘Language, Communication, Culture’ Conference, this session welcomes 20-minute papers which contribute new approaches to and perceptions of, among other topics,

humanist photography as cultural practice in society as social space

the work of individual humanist photographers

humanist photography as pedagogical resource for democratic education

the role and significance of humanist photography for theories of visuality and of the image

how humanist photography foregrounds the everyday as a meaningful context of democratic practices of hope in struggles for participatory citizenship and common humanity

humanist photography as intellectual practice and its relations with the intellectual practice characteristic of cultural studies in its democratic socialist traditions and perspectives

how humanist photography illuminates the relation of society and culture and challenges what Pierre Bourdieu called the myth of globalisation

humanist photography as ground and context for analysis of the theory of culture as the study of relations between elements in ways of life and struggle.


Session 4: The role of Indigenous Languages: the driving force behind Development

Session organiser:
Vicky Hartnack

The dilemma of sub-Saharan Africa more particularly, but also of other continents and subcontinents in the so-called Third World, seems to be its overall failure to consolidate and enhance the languages of its own discourses so that it is thrown back upon Western notions, discourses and models of what development means. It has tended to push forward Western ideas about what is lacking, what is good for its economic growth and, indeed, what goals African societies should strive towards. 

Societal literacy is a relative newcomer in sub-Saharan Africa and written traditions are still in the process of being forged (unlike North Africa and Asia). The oral traditions that formed the religious, cultural and political foundations of African civilizations have had to seek written expression in the writings and idioms of others (usually the ones of the colonial powers of yesterday or the neo-colonial powers of today). 

To break the deadlock, perhaps it is necessary to go back to indigenous discourse so as to develop new literacies in what Bhabha calls «the third space», involving the people themselves and not only the elites. In effect, and following Ngugi wa Thiongo’s idea of decolonising the mind – be it in the form of Western cultural values or theories of economic development – Africans have to create their own systems of knowledge in familiar printed discourses and learn to un-learn the language of colonialism/neo-colonialism. To do this, intellectual endeavour has to be African-centred and what is solid and «buildable» of African languages, culture and history has to be used in harmony with what has already been achieved in new African realities. Maybe only then can Africa face its future and deal with development on its own terms.


Session 5: Making Sense of Tourism in/and Contemporary Globalised World

Session organisers:
Maria João Ramos
Maria João Cordeiro

Given its own seductive nature and its association with leisure and travel, tourism was not, for a long time, in the centre of academic debate within the social sciences. But recently tourism has motivated and increasingly prompted analyses and critical approaches from various fields of research.
Tourism, the largest industry in a world primarily defined by mobility and travelling, is viewed as indissolubly connected to the complexities and problems of contemporary existence. There seems to be a growing awareness of the important contribution the tourist phenomenon – a whole set of social and cultural practices – offers to the understanding of the world we live in: a world increasingly shaped, not by work and production, but by leisure and consumption; a society not of producers but of consumers.
Tourism must be seen both as a “global social phenomenon” and a “globalised business or industry”, a “global process of commodification and consumption involving flows of people, capital, images and cultures”.

In this context, we welcome 20-minute papers dealing with these and/or related questions:
· Tourism and the media
· Tourist perceptions and representations
· Tourism and displacement/dislocation
· Tourism and globalisation
· Tourism history
· Representation / commodification of the past/ places, peoples and cultures
· Construction and negotiation of identities 
· (Non-)encounters of tourists and hosts 


Session 6: Media Events and Cultural Memory

Session organiser:
Cláudia Álvares

Media events are considered to represent a rupture in the status quo, leading to a redefinition of the prevalent social order. However, although media events may disrupt linear time, they nevertheless are ultimately reabsorbed into daily life. The issues stemming from this reabsorption are twofold: on one hand, media events can be seen as simply being assimilated into a dominant social structure, reproducing the latter through their cohesive function; on the other hand, they may be regarded as having disintegrative effects, due to the reinforcement of existent social conflicts. 
In light of the first option, the boundary separating media events from media rituals starts to wane, due to the fact that media events serve the purpose of legitimating a dominant ‘centre’. In light of the second option, media events may contribute to an active restructuring of the established order. Cultural memory, as translated by media events, thus can be seen both as an imposition of a ritualised legacy, as well as a site of permanent contestation and redefinition. 
This session welcomes 20-minute papers on themes that address the relationship between media events, in their multiple aspects, and the consolidation of cultural memory as a hegemonic process. 


Session 7: Performing Critical Pedagogy/ies: Cross-cultural perspectives and practices

Session organiser:
Édia Cristina Pinho

Critical Pedagogy cannot be reduced to academic research and writing on specific issues; it must be understood, Henry Giroux argues, as “an act of decentering, a form of transit and border crossing, a way of constructing an intercultural politics in which dialogue, exchange and translation take place across different communities, national boundaries and regional borders”.
With Giroux’s argument in mind, this session invites scholars from different areas of knowledge to perform a transdisciplinary reading and reconceptualization of Critical Pedagogy aimed at rethinking and developing new spaces for cross-cultural interactivity and creativity as part of a wider project for educational and social change. It welcomes 20-minute papers dealing with, or focusing on, the challenge of examining how Cultural Studies’ interpretative and performative framework is fundamental to creating integrative and expansive transdisciplinary articulations which inform and extend the possibilities for (re)presenting, (re)evaluating and (re)inventing Critical Pedagogy / -ies.


Session 8: Knowledge and Power: history, geography, representation, identity in post-colonial studies

Session organisers:
Luísa Leal de Faria
Teresa Malafaia
Adelaide Serras

In Orientalism, Edward Said selected these two great Baconian themes - Knowledge and Power - as dominant in the discourse of imperial authority. “Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant … To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it”. And, in Culture and Imperialism, he called for ‘a different and innovative paradigm for humanistic research’, ‘a way of regarding our world as amenable to investigation and interrogation without magic keys, special jargons and instruments, curtained-off practices’, a way through which ‘the disenchantments, the disputations and systematically sceptical investigations in innovative work … submit these composite, hybrid identities [the caliphate, the state, the orthodox clerisy, the Establishment] to a negative dialectics which dissolves them into variously constructed components. What matters a great deal more than the stable identity kept current in official discourse is the contestatory force of an interpretative method whose material is the disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above all overlapping streams of historical evidence.’


Both in method and content Said’s books contributed to a new approach to post-colonial theory and practice. A year after his death we would like to address some of the issues he developed in his work. We, therefore, welcome papers (15 to 20 minutes reading) on the following subjects:

1. Histories of Empires and Colonies
2. Women and Empires
3. Old Empires and Indirect Colonialism
4. Post-colonial Theories in the 21st century
5. Said’s works and their importance in post-colonial cultural criticism


Session 9: Representations of culture from within and from without 

Session organiser
Maria José Simas

What breathing space for cultural practices and identity in the mesh of social and political dimensions that frame representations of culture? This session has been suggested by the particular situation enjoyed by Beja, the host city of the Second International 'Language - Communication - Culture' Conference.

Caught between issues of power and geographic location, political ‘agending’, cultural policies, economic designing and shared representations, the southern region of Alentejo, where the city of Beja nestles, has been the proverbial sitting duck. The target for pitiless jokes, it has also been branded a region of ‘red extremists’ and ‘slow coaches’. And yet it has survived all the stamping, displaying an amazing ability to rebound, recover and recreate itself. Like the whole of Alentejo, Beja enjoys a strong sense of identity reinforced by geography, and offers itself as a good example of cultural resistance and emancipation.

With this in mind and wishing to bring to Beja a discussion on community agency and resistance to ‘tagging from without’, this session welcomes papers that address any of the following:
§ the interplay between cultural heritage and cultural marketability in the context of cultural policies
§ cultural rituals and cultural representations
§ issues of cultural creativity vis-à-vis pressures exerted on community
§ the interplay of cultural representations and representational practices, its restrictions and possibilities 
§ the ability of culture to endure, renew itself and, so often, resist appropriation.


Session 10: Young People, New Media & Inter-cultural Exchanges

Session organiser:
Margarida Morgado

The emergence and effective use of new media, and in particular of modes of electronic communication, has put young people in dialogue through space and circumstance and opened up new modes of learning. New media are connected to economic growth, business, but also to the field of education and learning. New learning communities, formal and informal, are frequently inter-cultural: they promote the sharing of ideas and knowledge across age, families, regions, countries, languages, thereby putting pressure on current educational practices and curricula but also on notions of cultural identity.

Papers addressing any of the following aspects are welcome:

· New media: informal, formal or less formal educational ‘places’ of young people 
· Problems, fears, advantages inherent to young people’s interactions with new media within or outside of the educative framework
· New media in the classroom: new ‘literacies’, threats, dangers, creativity and autonomy
· New media’s contributions to the formation of cultural identity
· The cultural, social and economic diversity of new media
· Young people’s interaction with new media analysed in terms of inter-cultural exchanges.



Session 11: Negotiating Borders, Constructing the Self and the Other

Session organiser:
Ana Clara Birrrento

Both within the contemporary world and within academic discourses, identity has been conceptually important for an explanation of personal, national, social, political, religious and cultural changes. Defined by Stuart Hall as a point of suture, identity has been discussed as a subjective position and as a cultural construction, where the self and the other negotiate borders of uniqueness and difference, giving us an idea of who we are and how we relate to the others and to the world in which we live. As Amin Maalouf claims the future of society depends on accepting all identities, while recognizing our uniqueness.
Departing from Maalouf’s definition of identity in the context of the modern world, as complex, unique and irreplaceable, this session aims at bringing together scholars from all disciplines and fields of the humanities and social sciences and at discussing the ways how identity is constructed by different modes of representing the self and the other and of negotiating borders.

Session 12: Eastwards/Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the 21st Century?

Session organiser:
Clara Sarmento

This panel is specifically interested in themes and methods which characterize current research into gender in Japan, India, China and the Southeast Asian countries. Ideas derived from gender studies elsewhere in the world are being subjected to scrutiny for their utility in helping to describe and understand regional phenomena. But the concepts of Local and Global – with their discursive productions – do not function as a binary opposition: localism and globalism are mutually constitutive and researchers should interrogate those spaces of interaction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, bearing in mind their own embeddedness in social and cultural structures and their own historical memory.

We would like to provide a critical transnational perspective on some of the complex effects of the dynamics of cultural globalization, exploring the relation between gender and development, education and culture. We will also give attention to the ideological and rhetorical processes through which gender identity is constructed, by comparing textual grids and patterns of expectation (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998); the role of ethnography, anthropology, historiography, sociology, fiction, popular culture and different kinds of textual and visual sources in (re)inventing old/new male/female identities, their conversion into concepts (or politically correct stereotypes?) and circulation through time and space.

Therefore, this session will include reflections on topics such as: “Marriage in China as expression of a changing society” (Elisabetta C. R. C. David – CIEA), “Chinese Women in East Timor local communities” (Mª. Rosário Tique – CIEA), “Hindu Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire” (Mª. Deus Manso – Univ. Évora/Cepesa), “Poverty, Orphanage and Women slavery in the formation of Macao nuptial market” (Ivo Carneiro de Sousa – Univ. Porto/Cepesa) and “Critical Readings on Gender in Southeast Asia” (Clara Sarmento – ISCAP).