Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory
This conference will set out to explore how concepts of family have been acted out, reinvented, or deconstructed, through various media including the visual arts, literature, and museum exhibitions, across the centuries. The family picture will be considered both in its figurative and art factual forms. We will look at the significance of the family picture in literary works or films (e.g. W.G. Sebald, Georges Perec¹s W, or the Memory of Childhood, or Pedro Almodovar¹s All About my Mother), and we will consider alternative concepts of family and kinship as pictured in paintings, photographs, graphic novels, and other visual media.
We are interested in media transfers, the question of what happens to family pictures when they are included in literary or visual narratives whether these are autobiographical or fictional. We aim to explore how different media reproduce or replace the family picture, or evoke it once it becomes lost (e.g. through e-phrases). We are also interested in the types of narratives that are created in museums, social media and family albums, through displays of family pictures and portraits.
Key questions to be examined will include: what are the changing conventions of the family picture and how do they reflect the changing conceptions of the institution of the family? Who is the addressee of the family portrait?
How do family narratives and family pictures inform each other? What is the role of family pictures in individual and cultural memory? Is the family a privileged site of memorial transmission (Aleida Assmann, Marianne Hirsch)?
Has it become the central trope through which national history is framed? What role do family pictures play within other cultural forms, e.g. in literature or film? Can other cultural forms offer alternatives to the kinds of family portrait we associate with photography?
We call for papers in English from across the disciplines and periods, as we wish to consider how the notion of family translates across time, through various ways of picturing it.
This international, two-day conference is organized by Members of Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community and of the Department of European Cultures and Languages, Dr. Silke Arnold-de Simine, Dr. Joanne Leal, and Dr. Nathalie Wourm with the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck.
Confirmed keynote speakers are: Professor Martha Langford (Concordia University, Montreal) and Professor Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary University, London)
Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words to the organising committee at the following email address: brakc@bbk.ac.uk by 30 November 2013. We hope to publish a selection of the papers in due course.
10-11, July 2014
London, United Kingdom
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 November 2013
Number of Visits: 6578
The latest
- 100 Questions/ 32
- Third Regiment: Memoirs of an Iraqi Prisoner of War Doctor – 32
- Ta An Setareh (Up to that Star) (Part One)
- Memoirs of Mohammad Kazem Taqavi
- Theory Two: The Borderline Legitimacy Crisis of Oral History in the Academic System
- 100 Questions/ 31
- Third Regiment: Memoirs of an Iraqi Prisoner of War Doctor – 31
- 100 Questions/ 30
Most visited
- Memories of Mr. Jalal Setareh
- Validation: Challenges and Necessities
- 100 Questions/ 30
- The Story of a Street Classroom
- Third Regiment: Memoirs of an Iraqi Prisoner of War Doctor – 31
- 100 Questions/ 31
- Theory Two: The Borderline Legitimacy Crisis of Oral History in the Academic System
- Ta An Setareh (Up to that Star) (Part One)
Authenticating Oral History: From Possibility to Necessity
The use of oral history as one of the historical sources has long been one of the principal challenges facing oral historians and those who employ it in contemporary historiography. The development of international standards for oral history, as well as IRIB standards, was intended to address the criticisms raised in this regard. The relationship between Diplomatics in written records and oral history is reciprocal.100 Questions/27
What is the place of research ethics in compiling oral history?We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week.
Photo Album from The Doctor of fly
The Doctor of fly, authored by Fatemeh Dehghan Niri, presents the memoirs of Dr. Mohammad-Taqi Khorsandi Ashtiani, Professor Emeritus and a subspecialist in Otolaryngology at Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Compiled within the framework of oral history, the work recounts different stages of his life—from childhood and years of ...The Beating Pulse of a Nation at the Moment of Nowruz
Every year, in the days and nights leading up to Nowruz, Shohada Square had a special charm. A few days before the New Year, the shops would fill with customers, and street vendors would take over the sidewalks. You could find everything in their stalls (from items for the Haft Sin table, candles, goldfish, and spring flowers to clothes, bags, and shoes).
