From Thursday, September 20th to Saturday, September 22nd, 2018 the international conference Women in Transition — Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries will take place at St Peter's College, University of Oxford and at the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American Studies, King's College London.
The programme and further details about are available on the conference website. This event is open to the public, but registration is required. To book your place, please, follow this link.
About Women in Transition
This international, multilingual conference will bring together scholars, students, and writers — as well as sociologists, psychotherapists, and clinicians — working around the world. By choosing a thematic focus on 'transition' in women's lives, we encourage colleagues to present their research on women who have described how they have crossed biological, geopolitical, political borders, and emotional, sexual, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The international approach, with speakers — invited authors and artists representing different cultures — will help to emphasise the links and connections that bind women together, rather than those which separate them.
We are keen to include research from sociology, psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis and to consider the ways in which the changes and transitions women undergo influence the world we live in. We will especially be looking at the idea of crossing borders and how this influences identity and belonging, and the theme of crossing boundaries in the context of motherhood and grand-motherhood as well as gender and sexual orientation.
The topic is timely given the waves of migration all around the world in recent times, and the uncertainty about what Brexit legislation will mean, especially for transnational women and their families. Issues around gender equality and women's empowerment are central in our times. Gender and sexuality are also concepts that are changing, with gender and sexual fluidity being part of understanding women identities.
The presence of established writers, film-makers, and artists from several different countries, but also academics and practitioners, will enable discussion of the practice of representing one’s own life, and the transitions one has gone through, as well as the theory. The conference will present research on contemporary European women’s writing and on women’s lives from around the world and will enable networking between colleagues from different disciplines and institutions and at different stages of their careers.
Keynote Speaker
- Adalgisa Giorgio (Italian Studies, University of Bath)
Guest Speakers
- Marta Sanz (Spanish novelist and journalist)
- Mònica Rovira (Catalan filmmaker)
- Joanna Walsh (Writer, editor, illustrator and blogger based in the UK and Paris)
- Istanbul Queer Collective (Turkish performance artists)
- Representatives (exhibition and talk by 7 London-based Brazilian artists)
- Launch of Take 6 - Six Portuguese Women Writers, ed. Margaret Jull Costa
Organizers
- Maria-José Blanco (SPLAS, KCL; CCWW)
- Claire Williams (Portuguese, University of Oxford; CCWW)
This event is being planned in association with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR). With the support of the Instituto Cervantes Londres, the Camões Centre (King’s College London), the Camões Centre (Oxford), TORCH (University of Oxford) and Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (King’s College London).