Conceptualising Contact Zones in Languages, Cultures and Societies Research

Session Leader: Dr Joseph Ford (ILCS)

The notion of the ‘Contact Zone’ has been an important concept in understanding the impact of histories of colonialism and colonial encounter on perceptions of space, culture and everyday life in the present. While initially associated with the ‘postcolonial turn’ in literary studies in the early 1990s, the Contact Zone has since intersected with related concepts drawn from other disciplinary fields, such as migration studies, conflict studies, international relations, environmental humanities, gender and translation studies, among others.  n this session, participants will be invited to share their own understandings of Contact Zones and place those into dialogue with existing and new notions of the Contact Zone as they have changed since the inception of the concept. In doing so, the session is concerned with exploring how cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding the practices and arts of the Contact Zone continue to challenge bounded conceptualisations of language, culture and community in the past and present. 

Recommended preparatory reading for training session discussion:

• de la Cadena, Marisol and Arturo Escobar, Notes on excess: Towards pluriversal design. In: Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding, ed. by Martín Tironi, Marcos Chilet, Carola Ureta Marín, Pablo Hermansen (London: Routledge, 2023).  

Recommended Additional Reading:

• Pratt, Mary Louise, Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession (1991): 33–40. 

• Footitt, Hilary, Translation and the contact zones of International Development. The Translator 25.4 (2019): 385–400.     

Please note this session will involve small- and large-group discussions and those who register should be able to attend the full session and be prepared to interact with the session leader and the other participants. The initial presentation will be made available as a recording after the session.