Borders and Crossings: A Transdisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing
University of Tartu
6-8 July 2022
Venue: Jakobi 2, Tartu
The 2022 edition of the Borders & Crossings conference series acknowledges more than two decades of intense development in the transdisciplinary study of travel writing, which is now a well-established field of research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
The 2022 conference will take part in a unique context: that of a post-Soviet and Nordic country situated in a European geographical, economic and political context. Estonia’s history is marked by successive occupations, which could arguably be considered as a form of travel from the point of view of the occupiers. These occupations have affected travel to and from this area, and generated specific mobility, such as deportation and diaspora. This context brings our attention to restricted travels and the forms of control at work when it comes to travel. Additionally, this conference acknowledges the emergency of the ecological crisis and the pressure that travelling can put on the Earth system.
Program
Day 1, 6 July 2022
In Person / Rooms 1 & 2 / Streamed online
| 08:30-09:00 | Registration open | |
| 09:00-09:15 | Intro | |
| 09:15-10:45 |
Travels in Estonia (Zoom link) Moderator: Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
|
Heading East (Zoom link) Moderator: Tim Hannigan
|
| 10:45-11:00 | Break | |
| 11:00-12:30 |
Travel Theory (1) (Zoom link) Moderator: Ben Cocking
|
Scalar Travel (Zoom link) Moderator: Sara Bédard-Goulet
|
| 12:30-15:30 | Lunch & City Tour | |
| 15:30-16:30 | Keynote 1: Gina Stamm: Traveling Plants: Objects of Desire and Agents of Movement (Zoom link) | |
| 16:30-16:45 | Break | |
| 16:45-18:00 |
Travel in motion (Zoom link) Moderator: Julia O'Mahony
|
Travel Theory (2) (Zoom link) Moderator: Marie-Laure Delaporte
|
| 18:00-18:30 | Break | |
| 18:30- | Book Launch |
Program
Day 2, 7 July 2022
In Person / Rooms 1 & 2 / Streamed online
| 09:00-09:15 | Intro | |
| 09:15-10:15 | Keynote 2: Luc van Doorslaer: The Complexity of Cultural Translation in Travel Writing (Zoom link) | |
| 10:15-10:30 | Break | |
| 10:30-12:00 |
Translation & Transfiguration (Zoom link) Moderator: Luc van Doorslaer
|
Reconstructing identities (Zoom link) Moderator: Zoe Kinsley
|
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | |
| 13:00-14:30 |
Travels in Central Asia (Zoom link) Moderator: Julia Kuehn
|
Déterritorialisations et reterritorialisations : entre l’Est et l’Ouest (Zoom link) Moderator: Marge Käsper
|
| 14:30-14:45 | Break | |
| 14:45-16:15 |
Travels in Estonia & the USSR (Zoom link) Moderator: Julia O'Mahony
|
Female travel narratives (Zoom link) Moderator: Betty Haglund
|
| 16:15-16:30 | Break | |
| 16:30-17:30 |
Taking Flight (Zoom link) Moderator: Gina Stamm
|
Plants Mobility (Zoom link) Moderator: Tanel Lepsoo
|
| 19:00- | Conference Dinner |
Program
Day 3, 8 July 2022
In Person / Rooms 1 & 2 / Streamed online
| 10:00-12:00 | Estonian National Museum Tour | |
| 12:30-13:30 | Lunch | |
| 13:30-15:00 |
Travel & Conflict (Zoom link) Moderator: Sara Bédard-Goulet
|
Alternate Perspectives (Zoom link) Moderator: Kathryn Walchester
|
| 15:00-15:15 | Break | |
| 15:15-16:15 | Keynote 3: Leena Kurvet-Käosaar: Writing to Survive: Storying Life Experience of Forced Dislocation (Zoom link) | |
| 16:15-16:30 | Wrap Up | |
| 16:30- | [Optional] Bog Visit & Onwards Travel! |
Call for proposals
We invite conference participants to reflect on the following themes:
- Travel and translation, especially concerning “small languages”
- Travel to/from/around the Nordic and Baltic countries
- North-north, North-south, East-west interactions
- Dominant and vulnerable travellers and travellees
- Travel and decolonialization
- Slowness and stillness
- Familiar places and microspection
- Human and nonhuman travels
- Travel and the Anthropocene
- Travel and nature writing, ecocriticism
- Fiction and reality of travel
- Digital and proxy travels
- Travel and diseases, cure travels and places
- Images in transit
- Theories of travel and travel writing
- Travel and gender/sexuality
- Travel journalism, guidebooks and digital media
- Craft and practice of travel writing
- Heritage, pilgrimage and footsteps travel
The conference will take place at the University of Tartu and is open to postgraduate students, academics, and practitioners (inside or outside academia) interested in travel writing from a broad range of perspectives. With this conference, we wish to insist on the inclusivity of this field of study and practice and welcome proposals from but not restricted to literary studies, travel and tourism studies, media and journalism studies, creative writing, history, politics, sociology, and geography, with a focus on any time period and any geographical context.
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers or creative pieces, and for 60-minute panels of three speakers or writing workshops. Proposals of approximately 250 words for a paper (up to 600 words for a panel or workshop), accompanied by a short bionote (no longer than 100 words) including your academic affiliation (if applicable), should be sent to bordersandcrossings@ut.ee (doc or docx format appreciated) by 1 March 2022. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 April.
Although we wish for all participants to be able to attend the conference in Tartu, we plan for a hybrid conference so that participants unable to travel can still present their paper. A publication following the conference is planned but it will entail re-submitting an article abstract for a special issue in a peer-reviewed journal.
Deadline for abstracts: 1 March
Notification of acceptance: 1 April
Organisers
Sara Bédard-Goulet, University of Tartu professor of Romance Studies (sara.bedard-goulet@ut.ee)
Julia O’Mahony (omahonjl@tcd.ie)
Cover image: Anna Guilló, enhanced Forward Presence (eFP), 2020.
