We are delighted to announce the keynote speakers for our conference on Belonging & Mobility and invite you to find the preliminary sessions online. The NIAS Conference 2023 will take place from 18 to 20 October 2023 in Amsterdam. It looks to unpack Belonging as understood from a static default, and instead to inquire into and re-conceptualize belonging as not singular and place-bound but rather as a process, a doing.
Keynote speakers
Keynote speakers for the conference will be Nancy Foner and Amade M’Charek. Please find their bios here.
Conference Spheres
The conference will be structured around five ‘spheres’ where, we think, important narratives and practices of belonging are being negotiated and rendered (im)mobile. Each sphere will be curated by a renowned scholar in the field.
- The Body Politic
This sphere is concerned with the politics of belonging, and will examine how categories, practices and experiences of belonging intersect with mobilities.
Sphere Curator: Jan Willem Duyvendak
Find the preliminary sessions here
- (Re)making Public Space
Critical theorists have long pushed us to think about space in dynamic and processual ways. How are public spaces made, unmade and remade, particularly as a result of the flow of people? What contrasting conceptions of ‘publicness’ and ‘space’ are brought into the mix as a result of such flows?
Sphere Curator: Rahul Rao
Find the preliminary sessions here
- Dwelling / Home-ing
Home, in common sense, has typically to do with origin, nativeness, continuity or fixedness. However, none of these conditions matches the actual dwelling arrangements, and perhaps the aspirations, of an increasing number of people, including migrant newcomers and those in protracted displacement. What do provisional and ‘unhomely’ forms of dwelling suggest about home, belonging, and the interplay between the two?
Sphere Curator: Paolo Boccagni
Find the preliminary sessions here
- Ecologies of Belonging
Human exceptionalism has long prevailed in Western thinking of the social, but decolonial thought and the global climate crisis have together driven a re-thinking our ideas of society, state-drawn boundaries, and boundaries between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’.
Sphere Curator: Bernike Pasveer
Find the preliminary sessions here
- Belonging as / at Work
Both issues of belonging and work have increasingly been made flexible, but not for all in the same way and to the same degree. It seems that the precarities of belonging and work somehow neatly map onto each other, with those in search of ways to belong culturally also struggle to belong economically and vice versa. But what work does it take to enact forms of belonging?
Sphere Curator: Leo Lucassen
Find the preliminary sessions here