Proposal deadline: June 1, 2024
Conference registration deadline: July 10, 2024
(details will follow)
All presenters also need to be registered members of ASANOR. Click here for information on how to join us.
In 2025, Norway will observe the bicentennial commemoration of the first planned direct emigration from Norway to the Americas. In the wake of this first party of emigrants, nearly one million emigrants left Norway for various destinations, 800,000-900,000 to the United States alone. As migration has increasingly also taken on the character of re-migration and work migration, with communities and identities assuming diasporic and transnational markers, processes and manifestations of the transcultural do their work in sending as well as host countries. The development moreover reminds us that Norwegians and other emigrants to the Americas were also once immigrants. In the lead-up to the bicentennial commemoration of Norwegian emigration in 2025 the theme of the 2024 American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR) biannual conference will therefore focus on the multifaceted dimensions of migration and how migration currents and mentalities for centuries have affected both North America and sending countries in entangled fashions.
We welcome contributions from all disciplines that examine ties and networks created by emigration and expatriation in addition to immigrants’ lives. We further invite papers that explore how emigrants, expatriates, and travelers in America have reflected upon their lives and experiences in receiving societies in the Americas and how these expressions circulated among populations in the sending societies Specifically, entanglements between expatriate communities and their communities of origin, and how these shaped and were shaped by transatlantic public spheres that differed over time and according to context and power—will be of particular interest. Besides, the racialization of ethnic minorities in constructed hierarchies based on whiteness as well as immigrants’ exchanges with other ethnicities and indigenous peoples play into these experiences as they were expressed both in the USA and in the sending countries.
Themes to be addressed at the conference include but are not limited to:
– immigration/emigration epistemologies
– the creation of utopian communities
– travel writing
– life writing
– implications/effects of settler colonialism
– religious dimensions of emigration/immigration
– border studies
– immigrant regions/regionalisms
– translocal, transnational, and transcultural exchanges
– interethnic/-cultural exchanges
– gender studies
– aesthetic representations of the transcultural and transnational
The 2024 ASANOR Conference will be hosted by the Norwegian Emigrant Museum, Ottestad and Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar from October 3rd to October 5th, 2024. We invite contributions from a wide range of fields including but not limited to literature, history, political science, linguistics, religion, media, the arts, and cultural studies that explore the theme of migration, connections, and the creation of transcultural spheres.
To apply, please send a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biography to asanor2024@gmail.com by June 1, 2024.
American Studies Association of Norway 