Conference Programme "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity", Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, June 23-25, 2021 (original) (raw)

Conference Report "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity"

KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture, 2021

The concept of cultural hybridity seems ordinary now due to the daily usages of the term in a global context, but it covers a lengthy scholarly discourse. In the Winter Semester 2020/21, the discussion of Pnina Werbner's article on the dialectics of hybridity during a Research Area 6 meeting captivated the members' interest. What novel ideas does hybridity bring to different cultural environments, and how? Possible answers were that cultural shifts between the local and the global are involved, as well as encounters and reformulation of identities. The concept helps reflect on the interaction processes between identities and cultures by considering the emergence of new realities. The interdisciplinary and international conference "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity," from 23 to 25 June, aimed to shed light on the dynamics and social practices engaging hybridity as a tool of cultural analysis and formation. The experimental format of the laboratory conference aimed to inspire a reformulation of this concept and to bind everyday reality with academic knowledge during the keynote lecture, the two workshops, the eight panels, and the final laboratory debate.

Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity. With a Foreword by Pnina Werbner, Laura Popa, Roeland Goorts (Eds.)

2024

The history of the hybridity concept and the literature about hybridity show the continuous transformation of its meaning(s). It ranges from biological racist connotations in 19th-century colonialism to a powerful subversive tool for analysing asymmetric colonial encounters in 20th-century postcolonial studies. In the 20th century, hybridity and adjacent notions, such as transculturation, denoted this asymmetry. Bringing them into dialogue again in the 21st century, these and other related concepts may guide analyses of planetary cultural, economic, and political entanglements that avoid the false objectivism that the notion of ‘globalisation’ implies. As a result, the book critically reconsiders cultural hybridity as a concept for a world globally interconnected without losing the local articulations. So, this book argues that hybridity should be reframed with a view to the connections and entanglements it enables and complicates. As the world has become increasingly interconnected in the last few decades, this book investigates connectivity, relationships, and entanglements through new meanings and adjacent concepts, methods, and social expressions of hybridity. Methodologically, it examines hybridity within the framework of an increasingly interconnected global world, while analysing identities that intersect in cultural, socio-political, religious, and virtual spaces. The purpose of these multifaceted critical explorations is to reframe the potential and limits of hybridity in shedding light on the intersections between cultures on a global scale. ISBN 978-3-98940-042-9, 288 S., 36 Abb., kt., € 38,50 (2004) ISBN 978-3-98940-046-7, 288 S., 36 Abb., € 34,50 (E-Book/pdf, 2024) (GCSC - Giessen Contributions to the Study of Culture, Bd. 18) https://www.wvttrier.de/.../cultural-identities-in-a...

Conference Report on "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity

2021

The concept of cultural hybridity seems ordinary now due to the daily usages of the term in a global context, but it covers a lengthy scholarly discourse. In the Winter Semester 2020/21, the discussion of Pnina Werbner's article on the dialectics of hybridity during a Research Area 6 meeting captivated the members' interest. What novel ideas does hybridity bring to different cultural environments, and how? Possible answers were that cultural shifts between the local and the global are involved, as well as encounters and reformulation of identities. The concept helps reflect on the interaction processes between identities and cultures by considering the emergence of new realities. The interdisciplinary and international conference "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity," from 23 to 25 June, aimed to shed light on the dynamics and social practices engaging hybridity as a tool of cultural analysis and formation. The experimental format of the laboratory conference aimed to inspire a reformulation of this concept and to bind everyday reality with academic knowledge during the keynote lecture, the two workshops, the eight panels, and the final laboratory-debate. The conference started with a digital World Café through the platform Padlet.com. On the page created for the event, four questions were formulated to break the ice and present the participants. The questions respectively asked for a short introduction (name, university, faculty, degree), how hybridity relates to their scholarly work, how it relates to their daily life and, finally, the meaning of hybridity in a short sentence or word. To answer these questions the participants accessed the page and used the function of leaving a comment. This World Café showed the international, interdisciplinary and polyphonic aspects of hybridity in academic knowledge and everyday life among the participants. KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture 64/2021 journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online-2-The first panels of the first day were Negotiation of Gender in the Digital Era and Digitalisation of Culture. Both were held simultaneously, as both discussed the importance of the digital in rethinking concepts such as gender and culture. NEELLY FAS-SAD (Goethe University Frankfurt) opened the session Negotiation of Gender in the Digital Era chaired by LAURA POPA (Justus Liebig University Giessen), by focusing on the global spread of the image of the child-woman in digital pop-culture across Europe and Asia. In her poster presentation, "The Myth of the Child-Woman in Visual Media Concepts," Fas-sad analyzed how Lolita's sexualized aesthetics contribute to the hypersexualization of young girls, child pornography, and sexual violence against children on the Internet and social media platforms. In order to reclaim women's bodies, the new aesthetic of an asexualized, subversive Gothic Lolita was introduced. Following the same interest in gender aesthetics, ATHIRA B.K. (Jawaharlal Nehru University) discussed a novel bridehood imaginary emerging in India since the 1990s in her talk "Weddings and Digital Circuits: The Case of an Emergent Bridehood in India." As opposed to arguing that there is openness to hybrid cultural influences due to globalization, the results of her analysis of a series of Instagram wedding images during the COVID-19 crisis indicate that this newly formed aesthetic is not much negotiated and still bound to social, political, and religious hierarchies according to local contexts. A stronger negotiation of gender in the digital sphere has been proposed by AIDEN JAMES COSCIENZA (Temple University) in "Gender Hybridity, Cultural Hybridity, and Transcultural Audiences." He demonstrated how fans of media texts circulated on the Internet can selfdiscover and self-produce hybrid gender identities as a consequence of perceiving gender in the 21st century as a borderless territory related to global encounters. The panel Digitalisation of Culture was chaired by CLARA VERRI

CfP: Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural hybridity

2021

From the local, national to the global, cultural hybridity nowadays travels across the individual, political, religious, biological, cultural and virtual spaces in historical contexts of nation-states, transnational movements and globalization. The problematization of the term oscillates between essentialization and its usage as a categorical instrument. However, cultural hybridity can entangle new meanings and action-oriented concepts. This conference aims to reframe the discourse on hybridity by exploring this cultural artefact in theory and social practice and as a still useful analytical tool in the study of culture.

Identity and Culture. Cultural identities in a globalized world.

Third International Cross-Cultural Communication Conference (“Cultural Identity and Diversity as Assets to Global Understanding”), 2019

There is a painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel (who became known as “The Old Man”) whose original name is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, which Homi Bhabha (Rato, 2015) observes that should make us think. In the picture a small detail shows us Icarus, son of Daedalus, fallen from the sky to drown solitarily in the sea, after he tried to fly too high and burned the wings for having been near the sun, and no one noticing his drama. The picture is supposed to be from the dreadful perspective of Daedalus, watching impotently from above the misfortune of his own son. This leads to a question by Bhabha: “After all, who is the moral witness of human suffering, today?” According to the scholar, this is one of the questions that Culture can make the world. A self-reflexive question, as the role of witness is one of the places of Culture. Another question is to think if Culture is not the peripheral and secondary detail that makes us reconsider the whole system, just like the legs of Icarus, when we finally look at them, at Pieter Bruegel’s picture. The concept of “Culture” has several meanings, continuing to be problematized and reformulated constantly, making the word complex and impossible to be fixed in an unique way. The same happens with ‘identity’, that is a concept that must be declined in the plural. In the current paradigm crisis, the identity plan integrates a broader process of change that has shaken the frames of reference that previously seemed to give individuals some stability. Stuart Hall notes that identity theories have shattered, and identities are in the process of disintegration as a result of cultural homogenization and ‘postmodern-global’ logic stemming from the globalization process. Thus, to talk about the existence of an eventual centrality of culture, it is necessary to leave behind the idea of absolute truth (Hall, 1997). Identity and difference are thus faces of the same coin (Martins, 2007), and memory must be preserved in a balanced way, in order to avoid amnesia and indifference from becoming dangerous ingredients of any barbarism, and so that resentment does not occupy the place of humanity. As Claude Dubar (2011) points out, the crisis is not only due to the passage from one economic cycle to another, but it has to do with the new ways of living together in the world, which highlight preconceived ideas about another, about himself and about the world itself. It is the acceptance of the ‘other’ which, moreover, there is, to determine the beginning of an ethical dimension, as stated Umberto Eco (1998). Or it shall be understood by an ‘other’ ubiquitous, in the design of Dominique Wolton (2003), who is no longer abstract or distant, but does not mean that it is more familiar or understandable. It is therefore an ‘other’ that will be understood as a sociological reality, integrating all elements resulting from cultural diversity, but also those that establish links, at the societies scale. With this communication, we propose a reflection on the relationship between identity and culture, observing how cultural identities are located in a globalized world.

Symbols, Cultures and Identities in a Time of Global Interchange

Name, Signature and Image as Symbols of Personal Identity in the Epochs of Oral, Written and Image Culture, 2015

Symbols, cultures and identities in a time of global interchange / edited by Paata Chkheidze, Hoang Thi Tho, and Yaroslav Pasko. p. cm.-(Cultural heritage and contemporary change. series vii, seminars: culture and values ; v. 27) Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Impact of ‘Globalization’ on Cultural Identities

2013

The purpose of this contribution is to analyze the impact that the ongoing globalization process has on the cultural identities of peoples. However, to be able to carry out this analysis it is first necessary to locate the process of globalization within the realm of understanding culture, something which is usually not done. The commonly used definition of globalization comes from the economic realm, from the opening up to free trade and from the growing interdependence of world markets at their different levels. To this definition is usually added the political and institutional dimension, the responsibility of the organisms of the United Nations, multilateral pacts, and regional agreements. In both dimensions there exist, certainly, involved cultural aspects: the so-called ‘cultural industry’ and ‘show business’ on the one hand, and cultural institutions protected by law, such as schools, universities and the media, on the other. However, with an approach of this type we only tou...