Workshop –
Transnational Homes: Identities in Displacement, 21 Sep, 2012
Friday 21 September 2012 saw the official launch of the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) with a workshop dedicated to the theme of Transnational Homes: Identities in Displacement. In her opening address Minister Jan O’Sullivan commended the aims of ICTS and the value of research on the themes of home and identity, particularly in the multi-cultural Ireland of today. The keynote lecture, Walter Benjamin and the City, was given by Professor Stéphane Symons (Catholic University of Louvain), and facilitated by the organiser of the event, Dr. Niall Keane. In a number of sessions, an international group of academics from across disciplines explored issues pertaining to the impacts of transnationalism on images of the home, oriented by various theoretical texts (Benjamin, Foucault, Améry).
The discussion pursued questions relating to transnational spatialities, manifest in their visual, linguistic, corporeal and cultural dimensions. A particular focus was placed on the notion of sites invested in the creation and dismantling of borders, mobilities and multivalent trajectories of identification. Engaging with the emerging literature on transnationalism, one of the aims of the one-day-event was to call into question the ideological appropriation of notions of transnational homes within differing, and often overlapping, discourses of neo-liberalism, cosmopolitanism, multi-culturalism and globalism.
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