Interfaceing 2022
Telling Innovations and Tradition East and West, September 30 - October 2, 2022
September 30, 2022, Trier University, Campus I, Room C9
October 1-2, 2022, Trier University, Campus I, Room A9/10, Room A11
Program can be found here. Or you can download the pdf here.
In many places in the world, success stories and innovation patterns link to narratives rooted in the historical tradition of a cultural sphere. Generally speaking, we can recognize two fundamental methods to deal with one’s cultural heritage: Either acknowledging the past as a rich source of cultural identity or as the origin of behaviorist patterns that strengthen or even enforce a positive development leading to innovation or a brighter future; or, conversely, perceiving the tradition as a heavy burden from the past that one needs to get rid of, whereby this emancipatory process can again serve as a stimulus of innovation.
Very often the perspective of the past is very schematic and based on formalistic or simplistic views or stereotypes – either positive or negative –, which are often emphasized in the education system by school curricula or in other normative ways. This is not a phenomenon of the present times, but can be observed throughout the history of culture.
The goal of the conference is to analyze and describe typical patterns, explaining the relationship between narratives of innovation and tradition, in particular of cultures within the Western sphere and East Asia. Papers probing into this subject matter from a comparative perspective are also encouraged.
interface, as a multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual journal, feels particularly suitable to convene a conference that will have these different attitudes to innovations and traditions juxtaposed, examined and interpreted in the light of each other. So we call scholars working in fields such as anthropology, geography, history, education, literature, art, and social sciences (e. g. politics, sociology, religion, and cultural studies) to submit proposals for either panels or individual papers.
The papers will be presented in any of the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian.
The conference will take place at Trier University, Germany, from 30 September to 02 October 2022. It is organized by the Institute of Sinology at Trier University.
Papers presented at the conference can be submitted for publication in the Special Topic issue(s) of interface to be published in 2023 (subject to double-blind peer review).
The Trier Organizing Committee of interfaceing 2022 would like to thank National Taiwan University (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures), Kobe University (Department of European Literature), University of Bristol (Department of Classics and Ancient History), and Seoul National University (Institute of Classical Studies) for their kind support and cooperation in organizing this conference.
