Event Details

In the 21st Century, who are the displaced? At a time of mass mobility and global change can we still speak of place-bound identities; given current instabilities, can we still find meaning in “the community”?
Displacement turns our attention to issues of justice, citizenship and authority in relation to mobility but displacement also implies a connection to the place left behind. Maintaining cultural traditions and remembering identities emerge from a desire to connect with this other place. The displaced often live through hope of an eventual return.
We think of displacement as a consequence of forced mobility. At the same time we are surrounded by the immobile displaced – those stranded by the economic and political changes of recent decades and for whom familiar places exist in an unrecognisable form – as a historical context for disadvantage – antithetical to the place in memory. Is there any common ground, a communitas, to be shared between the immobile and the mobile displaced? Must different memories destabilise any new community?
How ought we respond to these matters? What are the research methods enabling us to understand such transitions at local, national and global scales? What obligation do institutions owe to the communities, the displaced and the place-bound, whom we make the subjects of our research? What responsibilities do we have for bearing witness (making an archive) of the changes in our era and our locality?