July 14–16, 2017 | Barcelona, Spain CITY/GLOBAL Organised by The International Academic Forum The IAFOR International Conference on the City The IAFOR International Conference on Global Studies IAFOR Global Partners www.iafor.org/about/partners University of Belgrade www.city.iafor.org www.global.iafor.org Organising Committee Members Sue Ballyn Joseph Haldane Donald E. Hall Barcelona University, Spain The International Academic Forum Lehigh University, USA A. Robert Lee Kiyoshi Mana Baden Offord Nihon University, Japan (retd.) The International Academic Forum Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Bill Phillips Cornelis Martin Renes University of Barcelona, Spain University of Barcelona, Spain The Organising Committee of The IAFOR International Conference on the City 2017 (CITY2017) and The IAFOR International Conference on Global Studies 2017 (GLOBAL2017) is composed of distinguished academics who are experts in their fields. Organising Committee members may also be members of IAFOR's International Academic Advisory Board. The Organising Committee is responsible for nominating and vetting Keynote and Featured Speakers; developing the conference programme, including workshops, panels, targeted sessions; undertaking event outreach and promotion; recommending and attracting future Organising Committee members; working with IAFOR to select PhD students and early career academics for IAFOR-funded grants and scholarships; and reviewing abstracts submitted to the conference. 2 | IAFOR.ORG | CITY/GLOBAL2017 | #IAFOR Welcome to CITY2017 & GLOBAL2017 “[IAFOR] conferences present those taking part with three unique dimensions of experience, encouraging interdisciplinary discussion, facilitating heightened intercultural awareness, and promoting international exchange.” Professor Sue Jackson Pro-Vice Master for Teaching & Learning, Birkbeck, University of London Dear Colleagues, It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the beautiful city of Barcelona. Catalonia’s cosmopolitan capital, Barcelona is a cultural and artistic hub of activity that boasts a world-class university. Barcelona is also home to the final event in IAFOR’s European Conference Series, to which we welcome some 800 academics from more than 60 different countries over a two-week period in a celebration of interdisciplinary study. If this is your first IAFOR conference, and/or your first visit to Barcelona, then I would like to welcome you particularly warmly, and if you are a returnee, then welcome back. Reflecting the spirit of our host city, the programme for these conferences is diverse and exciting, and I would like to thank the many people involved with the planning of the events over the past year, from members of the Organising Committee, to members of the International Academic Advisory Board, to the dedicated team of professionals working behind the scenes at the IAFOR offices in Japan. I would like to thank the Keynote and Featured Speakers, the IAFOR journal editors, and each and every one of you for travelling from all corners of the earth so that we can come together today. I would also like to acknowledge and congratulate the recipients of IAFOR scholarships and research awards, including the 2017 recipients of the Stuart D. B. Picken Grant & Scholarship. This award was initiated in 2017 in the name of the first Chairman of IAFOR, who sadly passed away last year, and to recognise excellence in young scholars. As well as a scholar of international renown, Stuart was a kind and generous man, and it is fitting that his commitment to nurturing young academics from different backgrounds continues in the organisation he did so much to help found and shape. The heuristic and reality of an international academic forum, in which peoples engage with each other to discuss the latest research, test ideas, and take part in rigorous and challenging debates, has never been more important. IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, to facilitate intercultural awareness, to encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and to generate and share new knowledge, and we encourage you, as academics working throughout the world, to forge friendships and working relationships with your fellow delegates across national, religious and disciplinary borders, and in pursuit of the research synergies that drive positive change. It is in this spirit of friendship and international cooperation, and with the expectation of your active participation, that I express my warmest regards to you. Dr Joseph Haldane Chairman & CEO, The International Academic Forum #IAFOR | CITY/GLOBAL2017 | IAFOR.ORG | 3 CITY2017 "Cities of the World. World Cities." History has long shown an ambivalence towards the city. On the one hand, it has been the metropolis, a necessary, vital site of commerce and culture. On the other it has been considered the fallen place, at once dangerous and shadowed in crime. This ambivalence holds across continents, from the Americas to Asia, from Europe to Australasia. How, in an age of transnationalism and global media , should we regard these cities? What are our prevailing images of the city as past and present, magnet and threat? Do cities retain their lust re as citadels of enlightenment and art or are they urban dinosaurs wracked by over- crowdedness and pollution? IAFOR ’s forthcoming conference on the city is an exciting addition to our global conference calendar. It will place the international, intercultural and interdisciplinary tenets of IAFOR at the very heart of multiple academic approaches to the city, from the development of the classic city states east and west, to the emergence of the vast organisms that are our modern cities. Different cities have very different personalities, influenced, for example, by history, government, climate, and geographical location – from uptight financial powerhouses to relaxed tourist resorts, they are governed in different ways, and compete against each other for attention and resources, sometimes domestically, but also with other foreign rivals. This conference encourages interdisciplinary and comparative reflections from the world’s cities, from small cathedral city to sprawling metropolis. The city has always been a centre of creativity and imagination. The many cultures that are formed within the city have become definitive of the development of human civilisation in different eras. From the cities that were the product of the ancient river civilisations on the Nile and the Tigris Euphrates or the Ganges and the Yellow River , to the classical and medieval city states, to the modern cities of the industrial revolution, the city provides an exciting object of study. The conference is set up to encourage the exploration of the city in all its variations and to provide a further context for reflections on globalisation as the wave of today and tomorrow. 4 | IAFOR.ORG | CITY/GLOBAL2017 | #IAFOR GLOBAL2017 "Global Realities: Precarious Survival and Belonging" The theme for The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2014 in Osaka was “Borderlands of becoming, belonging and sharing”. In his presentation, Conference Co-Chair Professor Baden Offord wrote “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.” Now, at this second IAFOR Global Studies conference, we revisit that territory under the title “Global Realities: Precarious Survival and Belonging”. While retaining the ideas expressed by Professor Offord in 2014, this conference will turn its focus on to the precariousness of life across the world, life being understood in all its amplitude. Since 2014 we have witnessed the horror of the refugee crisis in Europe and how borders which should have been crossed have been blocked off by barbed wire fences. The whole context of borders, belonging and survival has shifted resulting in an increase in racism, radical nationalisms, terrorism, infringements of human rights, and rising poverty levels, to mention only a few of the globalised problems confronting our world. The result of such precarity, even of the planet itself, has led to a generalised sense of communal and individual vulnerability. Raimond Gaita recently noted, “It is striking how often people now speak of ‘a common humanity’ in ethically inflected registers, or ethically resonant tones that express a fellowship of all the peoples of the earth, or sometimes the hope for such a fellowship.” Hopefully, this conference will discuss the ways and means by which a “common humanity” may be aspired to by future generations. The organisers encourage submissions that approach the conference theme from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome and we also encourage sessions within and across a variety of interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. #IAFOR | CITY/GLOBAL2017 | IAFOR.ORG | 5 Submit your research to the IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies • Fair and rigorous peer the iafor review process journal of cultural studies • No submission or publication fees Volume 2 – Issue 1