Call for papers: Navigating Epistemic, Cultural, and Legal Translations: Processes, Hierarchies, Spaces

 Call for papers: Navigating Epistemic, Cultural, and Legal Translations: Processes, Hierarchies, Spaces - Regensburg 04/2025

Organiser: Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World (University of Regensburg & Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies)

Place: Regensburg (Germany)

Time: 23 - 25 April 2025

Deadline for Paper Proposals: 31 October 2024

All cultural, social, political and legal exchanges involve processes of transfer and translation. They include not only linguistic and cultural transfer, but also the transposition and therefore resemantization of meanings, symbols, institutions, norms, practices, and discourses across time, spaces and legal systems.

For instance, avantgarde movements, such as surrealism, as a transregional phenomenon comprising Europe and the Americas, translated cultural meaning back and forward within and between regional or linguistic contexts and artistic forms. Other processes of transfer and translations include networked social and political movements such as Latin American or East European feminisms. Legal orders – both domestic and international – are also shaped by processes of transfer and translation. Recent approaches in comparative law seek to take into account movements of norms and their contextualization. And even the language and vocabulary of international law, which is associated with the idea of universality, seems to be approached, adapted and applied differently by state and non-state actors in different locations. All these processes of cultural, social, and legal transfer and translation can be analyzed in terms of traveling ideas, practices, and aesthetics whose meanings, functions, and reception change in their new surroundings, particularly when polycentric, post-colonial, or post-imperial settings are at play.

Individual and collective actors – who navigate, renegotiate, and challenge interpretations and meanings – play important roles as intermediaries. Alongside social and cultural structures, they make transregional transfer processes interactive, interconnected, and productive. However, these processes also go hand in hand with substantial scopes for at times unexpected adaptations, contestatory re-appropriations, or creative re-translations. They evolve in contexts of local, regional and global power imbalances, cultural differences, and historical legacies of colonial or imperial inequalities, which engender frictions (Tsing), effects of mimicry (Bhabha), but also spark potential for cultural and social innovation. Hence, moving beyond the idea of translation processes conceived as uncontested one-way streets in neutral spaces, our aim is to shed light on the multifaceted implications of translation, transfer, and circulation of culturally situated knowledge and (legal) norms from different disciplinary, theoretical, and empirical perspectives.

Combining area studies-focused research in the social sciences, cultural studies, media studies, and literary studies, the conference seeks to attract a wide range of papers that analyse processes of transfer and translation in polycentric contexts. It focuses on the transatlantic entanglements of the Americas with Western and Southern Europe, and of the Americas with Eastern Europe - broadly defined to include East and East-Central Europe, Southeast Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia - from the 18th century to the present. Our aim is to promote a multidisciplinary dialogue on the analysis, theoretical frameworks and broader narrativisation of transfer and translation processes.

Further information can be found in the Call for Papers, downloadable here: https://forhistiur.net/media/nachrichten/CfP_LSC_Conference_2025.pdf