Event | ‘Narratives: Negotiating Meaning, Knowledge, and Identity’ – LUCAS Graduate Conference

Event | ‘Narratives: Negotiating Meaning, Knowledge, and Identity’ – LUCAS Graduate Conference
Date: 11-12 April 2024
Time: 08:45-18:45 (Thursday 11 April); 9:00-17:30 (Friday 12 April)
Location: Leiden University
Organizers: LUCAS graduate conference committee
Contact: lucasconference@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Credits: TBA
CfP and more information here.

On the 11th and 12th of April 2024, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) will host a two-day conference entitled Narratives: Negotiating Meaning, Knowledge, and Identity. This conference offers an opportunity for humanities researchers from different disciplines to connect, present, and discuss their research in an international and interdisciplinary environment.

Our conference will feature keynote lectures by Caroline Dodds Pennock, Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield and Nidesh Lawtoo, Professor of Modern/Contemporary European Literature and Culture at Leiden University.

This cross-cultural and cross-historical conference asks: how do we shape the world through narrative, and how do these narratives in turn shape us? Narratives have enabled the preservation of shared cultural memory, the production of knowledge, and the fashioning of selves. How do stories and storytelling function within society as communal ties or generational bridges? How can we unearth marginalized voices and destabilize gendered, racial, colonial, and anthropocentric narratives? With the rise of social media and the emergence of post-truth politics and ‘fake news’, the lines between narrative and reality have also become increasingly blurred, broadening the scope of research in the field.

We welcome contributions from researchers working on different time periods and cultures across all of the humanities and social sciences. Participants are invited to consider topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Narrative, form and genre
• Narrative hermeneutics
• Archival narratives and/or the production of knowledge
• Narratives of migration
• Narratives and cultural memory
• Narratives of selfhood and communal identity
• Narrators: whose voices do we hear, and why does it matter?
• Factual versus fictional narratives
• (De)colonizing narratives
• Transmedial, virtual, and interactive (multi)narratives
• Non-human narratives and post-human narratives