“Imagining the Other: Theo-political Challenges in an Age of Migration”

We live in an age of migration—often forced—with its special challenges. How we imagine “the other” is a decisive element in the (theo-)politics of exclusion and desire that feed on these challenges. Aware that imagination is a mimetic process, COV&R’s 2019 annual meeting wants to address these challenges by trying to illumine different aspects of this complex entanglement, asking whom or what we mean by “the other”: the stranger and migrant, the brother or sister, nature that envelopes or defies us, the transcendent Other to whom religions refer, the other sex or gender….

Scheduled subsections will include:

Migration, ecology, and economic justice

Exclusion and the transcendent Other

Imagining the other: media coverage of migrants and refugees

How do Europeans view the “others”?

…

The theme, “Imagining the Other,” also widens the conference’s range of topics beyond migration to other fields of interest for COV&R members.

For these and other topics we are looking forward to your paper or other proposals which are due by March 31st, 2019. Information on travel, accommodations and the optional cultural program is now available on the conference website.

COV&R 2019 will coincide with the 350th jubilee of the University of Innsbruck, western Austria’s largest institution of research, with 28,000 students and 4,500 staff. Innsbruck is a city of 132,000 located at an elevation of 574 meters (1,722 feet) in the Inn River valley surrounded by mountains of the Tyrolian Alps extending up to 2,300 meters (7,000 feet) that can be reached by a cable car.