3 - 5 December 2007, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia
Supported by the Innovative Universities European Union Centre and the European Commission's Delegation to Australia

This conference will examine issues of migration, transnational connection, displacement heritage, global space and cultural memory created by the movements of peoples between cultures in the modern world. To view the conference program, please visit http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/events/mc_conf/mc_programme.pdf

In the mass migrations of the last 200 years, millions of people have left their homelands and home cultures to settle in new places. Their motives have been many: the emigrant’s search for new opportunities, the gastarbeiter’s self-imposed exile, the refugee’s forced flight and the settler’s quest for trade, military advantage or fresh fields and pastures new have all shaped the great migrations of the modern period.

Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities will explore the cultural connections between homelands and new lands, and the complexities of reshaping cultural identities and shifting allegiances between cultures of departure and cultures of arrival.

The conference will have three main streams:

• The public policy stream will cover issues of economics, population, forced migration, security, ‘core values’, education and the managing of cultural impacts of migration.
  
  
• The history of migration stream will include sessions on pre- and post-World War Two migration, recent arrivals and diasporic communities.
  
  
• The cultural migration stream will include sessions on memory, writing, language, cultural maintenance and sustainability, and the plurality of migrant identities.

Conference themes

• The demographics of people flow: who moves where? and why?
  
• Forced migration in the Asia Pacific
  
• Cultural, political and economic factors shaping migration. How are connections made?
  
• Bordering the nation: migration and national security
  
• Transnationalism, citizenship and sovereignty
  
• Gender and generational issues in the migration experience
  
• Linguistics, diaspora and migration
  
• Settling down, settlement patterns and return migration
  
• Can multi-cultures and multi-ethnicities produce one nation?
  
• Multiculturalism
  
• Language maintenance in the new culture
  
• Foodways
  
• Migration, place and situated identities
  
• Connections with the new place and (re)negotiating with the old
  
• Home and Away: What is transferred from the home culture to the new culture? What cannot fit in the baggage?
  
• Imaginary homelands: life-writing, creative writing and film responses to the migration experience
  
• Unsettlement: the idea of the settler colony
  
• Cultural memory: heritage and exchange
  
• Transplanted cultures as tourist attractions
  
• Fusion, ‘cultural hybridity’, cosmopolitanism …

Guest speakers: The conference will feature plenary session addresses by leading international scholars in the field, as well as parallel presentations by researchers and policy-makers.

Conference commences Monday, 3rd December - registration opens at 8.00 am, Keynote speaker at 9.30 am and conference sessions at 11 am, Monday, 3rd December, 2007. Tuesday and Wednesday sessions are from 9.00 am to 5.30 pm. The conference finishes on Wednesday 5th December at 5.30 pm.

Academics, students and the general public are welcome to attend all or part of this conference.

To view abstracts and register, please visit http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/events/movingcultures.html