ACCS 2014 - The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2014 ACCS2014

Local, national and global cultures have been transformed by an intensification of human migration, mobility and multi-culture with multiple and complex claims of home, identity and belonging. Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of the borderland has become a critical conceptual rubric used by cultural researchers as a way of understanding, explaining and articulating the in-determined, vague, ambiguous nature of everyday life and the cultural politics of border-knowledge, border crossings, transgression, living in-between and multiple belongings. Borderlands is also about a social space where people of diverse backgrounds and identities meet and share a space in which the politics of co-presence and co-existence are experienced and enacted in mundane ways. This conference, which focuses on the borderlands of becoming, belonging and sharing, is therefore about examining how the culture of everyday life is regulated and contested across diverse political, economic and social contexts, and whether and how it creates spaces of belonging with others.
The aim of this conference theme is to open up discussion, critical reflection and analysis about emerging social, political and cultural identities that are formed at the intersection of multiple and multi-sited belongings and their expression and about the possibility of making them shared across differences.
We hope that the 2014 conference theme will encourage academic and personal encounters and exchanges across national, religious, cultural and disciplinary divides. We look forward to seeing you (again) in Osaka!