Thinking through and beyond – in other words “trans” – established understandings of culture, the International Workshop “Recalibrating Culture – Reconfiguring the (Trans-)Cultural” sets out to rethink notions of culture, which are currently conceived as self-contained and clearly separable, man-made, stable units. Taking a critical view of this perspective, the Cluster of Exellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context,” and the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies have for many years developed the transcultural approach. This workshop would like to expand and critically evaluate, as well as to theorize the transcultural from a visual perspective: expanding visual culture into visual transculturality and reconsidering the transcultural from the visual; doing so adds new dimensions of thinking the transcultural.
Transculturality is an established concept and field of research, not only in the Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies. It needs more theory—especially in face of, for example, new naturalisms, ‘post-culturalisms’ and others—through new perspectives on nature/culture-configurations. The aim of the workshops is to focus the perspective with regard to visual and iconic configurations of transculturality, to we look for re-visions, and use the concept of con-figurations, because figures, figuration and their configurations are epistemic, ethic and aesthetic concepts of description and conceptualization.
The workshop is the highlight and culmination of the ongoing HCTS Lecture Series "Recalibrating Culture – Reenvisioning the (Trans-)Cultural – C’est quoi la (trans-)culture?" to which Steven Connor (Cambridge University), W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago), Antoine Hennion (École Mines Paris Tech, Paris), Gisèle Sapiro and Jacques Revel (both EHESS, Paris), David Alworth (Harvard University), Burkhard Liebsch (Bochum University) and Gottfried Boehm (eikones Basel) have and will contribute throughout this academic year. Keynote speakers at the workshop include, amongst others, Dieter Mersch (Züricher Hochschule der Künste), Markus Gabriel (Bonn University), Christoph Wulff (Freie Universität Berlin), Hans Belting (ZKM Karlsruhe), and Monica Juneja (Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies).
The aim of theworkshop is to bring together these well-established senior scholars with young and upcoming academics, thus fostering a creative as well as antagonistic dialogue between past and future key players from various disciplines and fields.
The conference languages will be English, French and German.
Paper abstracts are to be submitted by September 25, 2018. You can find more information on the call for papers below:
The conference languages will be English, French and German.
Paper abstracts are to be submitted by September 25, 2018. You can find more information on the call for papers below: