IAFOR > The Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC) > BAMC2020 > Programme (Online)

Programme (Online)

Due to continued uncertainties surrounding the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, BAMC2020 will be held Online via Zoom.

This page provides details of presentations and other programming. For more information about presenters, please visit the Speakers page.

Conference Outline*

All times are Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Thursday, September 17, 2020Friday, September 18, 2020Saturday, September 19, 2020

09:00-09:15: Announcements, Recognition of IAFOR Scholarship Winners, Welcome Address
Joseph Haldane, IAFOR, Japan

09:15-10:00: Keynote Presentation
Parenting Education Within Contexts of Vulnerability and Child Protection: Positive Parenting, Resilience and Vulnerability
Nuria Fuentes-Peláez, University of Barcelona, Spain

10:00-10:10: Break

10:10-10:50: Keynote Presentation
Utopia Depends on a U-turn: Intertextuality, New Writing and Educating for Diversity
John Ryan, Freelance Writer, Australia

10:50-11:00: Break

11:00-12:00: Discussion Panel
In Conversation with Gloria Montero
Gloria Montero Novelist, Playwright & Poet, Spain
Isabel Alonso-Breto, University of Barcelona, Spain

12:00-12:20: Break

12:20-14:00: Live-Stream Parallel Session 1

14:00-14:20: Break

14:20-15:35: Live-Stream Parallel Session 2

09:00-09:10: Plenary Welcome Address
Joseph Haldane, IAFOR, Japan

09:10-09:55: Keynote Presentation
Knock Knock... Who's There?
Gloria Montero Novelist, Playwright & Poet, Spain

09:55-10:05: Break

10:05-10:50: Keynote Presentation
Utopia Depends on a U-turn: Intertextuality, New Writing and Educating for Diversity
John Ryan, Freelance Writer, Australia

10:50-11:00: Break

11:00-12:00: Discussion Panel
In Conversation with Gloria Montero
Gloria Montero Novelist, Playwright & Poet, Spain
Isabel Alonso-Breto, University of Barcelona, Spain

12:00-12:10: Break

12:10-14:00: Live-Stream Parallel Session 1

14:00-14:10: Break

14:10-16:15: Live-Stream Parallel Session 2

09:00-09:05: Welcome from the Organising Committee

09:05-09:50: Keynote Presentation
The Relevance of the Humanities and Arts in Uncertain Times
Baden Offord, Curtin University, Australia

09:50-10:00: Break

10:00-10:50: Parallel Session 1

10:50-11:00: Break

11:00-12:40: Parallel Session 2

12:40-12:50: Break

12:50-14:30: Parallel Session 3

14:30-14:40: Break

14:40-15:25: Keynote Presentation
Dislocation/Invitation
Donald Hall, University of Rochester, United States

15:25-15:35: Conference Closing Address
Joseph Haldane, IAFOR, Japan

The draft version of the Conference Programme will be available online on September 03, 2020. All registered delegates will be notified of this publication by email.

*Please be aware that the above schedule may be subject to change.

Featured Presentations

  • KNOCK KNOCK… WHO’S THERE?
    KNOCK KNOCK… WHO’S THERE?
    Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero
  • Utopia Depends on a U-turn: Intertextuality, New Writing and Educating for Diversity
    Utopia Depends on a U-turn: Intertextuality, New Writing and Educating for Diversity
    Keynote Presentation: John Ryan
  • In Conversation with Gloria Montero
    In Conversation with Gloria Montero
    Discussion Panel: Isabel Alonso-Breto & Gloria Montero
  • The Relevance of the Humanities and Arts in Uncertain Times
    The Relevance of the Humanities and Arts in Uncertain Times
    Keynote Presentation: Baden Offord
  • Embracing Difference: The Work of Art
    Embracing Difference: The Work of Art
    Panel Presentation: Emilienne Malfatto, Stephen Copland, Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio & Martin Renes
  • Parenting Education Within Contexts of Vulnerability and Child Protection: Positive Parenting, Resilience and Vulnerability
    Parenting Education Within Contexts of Vulnerability and Child Protection: Positive Parenting, Resilience and Vulnerability
    Featured Presentation: Nuria Fuentes-Peláez

Final Programme

The online version of the Conference Programme is now available to view below via the Issuu viewing platform. Alternatively, download a PDF version. The Conference Programme can also be viewed on the Issuu website (requires a web browser). An Issuu app is available for Android users.

Click to download as a PDF

The Conference Programme contains access information, session information and a detailed day-to-day presentation schedule.

KNOCK KNOCK… WHO’S THERE?
Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero

From the dizzying heights of what Malcolm Gladwell calls the magic moment when an element crosses a threshold and takes hold causing everything to change, the message is clear. Just last year, in an international IAFOR conference in Tokyo considering how we might reclaim the future we assumed the answer to the apocryphal “Knock, Knock, Who's There?” to be someone warning us we had only a short time left to make the necessary changes to combat global warming, Artificial Intelligence, biological change, gender problems or whatever other catastrophe to our way of living. Now, a year later, having witnessed a continent in flames, thousands of animal species destroyed and seen gender and racist messages brought to a head, we have been stopped in our tracks by a virulent pandemic. As governments decreed the confinement and lockdown deemed necessary to confront the lethal virus, each one of us has been forced to question the most private aspects of ourselves and our fears. Epidemiologists proffer contrasting theories of how the virus will evolve, conspiracy advocates paint dire pictures that offer no solution and entire countries attempt to balance the immediate problems of public health and the economy. Statistics enumerate the schools closed, companies forced out of business, theatres, cinemas, museums closed tight, millions out of work. To keep safe we're told to keep our distance, wear masks, protect ourselves from each other. We feel abandoned. We wonder where the future has gone. Although some scientists continue to insist there's still a chance to make a change, the apocryphal voice answering our knock has now made it clear. We've run out of time, even to celebrate and embrace the differences that have inevitably made our collectives richer and more diverse. We must now recognise ourselves and each other for what we are – human creatures made up of energy, much more similar than different despite skin colours, ethnicity or even gender... interdependent with the flora and fauna of the planet and even, cosmophysicists assure us, with the elements of our universe. The universal consciousness implied is hardly new but was already known by Greco-Roman philosophers. Accepting this proven interrelation makes it easier to understand how every action – in the way we deal with each other, in our work, in what we write and teach, as consumers and citizens – has an impact on our world. Enough of us consciously making an ethical impact might well be our only hope for a conceivable future we are able to live with. But TIME'S UP... If we are going to make a change, we must do it now.

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Utopia Depends on a U-turn: Intertextuality, New Writing and Educating for Diversity
Keynote Presentation: John Ryan

This paper explores the question: when we bring literature to life through acts of reading, are we merely imagining that connections exist between the two domains: life and reading? Existentialists have ascribed human life to be a swirling state of incoherence, a mash-up of fragments, random and raw, scratchings on stone and occasional flashes of fire in the deadwind of existence.

There are writers, artists and filmmakers who have made this ontological emptiness their subject. Some have made retellings of these stories their subject: Lucino Visconti’s film of Camus’ The Stranger and (more recently) Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation come to mind. Others have organised the raw material of everyday life into narratives to generate sense and meaning in the service of their work. They have made a literary ‘place’, rich with meaning take shape out of the utterly messy resource of lived experience. Perhaps it is this lack of purity in the relationship between life and literature that has prompted N. K. Jemisin to refer to ‘mere tolerance’ and ‘that grudging pittance of respect that is diversity’ in her recent collection of stories, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? In Jemisin’s short story The Ones Who Stay and Fight (her response to Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas), the citizens of Um-Helat ‘are not naïve believers in good intentions as the solution to all ills.’ Words, written words, are not enough. To fight is to create a society that consciously faces, ‘without flinching’ as author Toni Morrison puts it, its own poisons; its tribalism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, greed, cruelty, anger and the excuse that any of these is natural.

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In Conversation with Gloria Montero
Discussion Panel: Isabel Alonso-Breto & Gloria Montero

Sessions titled "Writers in Conversation" belong to a long established format both in journalism, broadcasting and academia. The time allowed for the conversation allows both the writer in question and the interviewer to range over a wide selection of topics thus creating a good profile of both personalities.

In this session Isabel Alonso will be talking to writer Gloria Montero. Gloria Montero has a long trajectory as a writer of fiction, drama and poetry along with essays. Her most famous work is, of course, the play Frida K. Isabel Alonso has long been active in creative writing studies and is also a writer herself. Both have known each other for a long time and so we will be able to sit in on a wide ranging and fascinating conversation between the two. Prepare your arm-chairs!

Discussants:
Isabel Alonso-Breto, University of Barcelona, Spain
Gloria Montero, Novelist, Playwright & Poet, Spain

Read presenter biographies
The Relevance of the Humanities and Arts in Uncertain Times
Keynote Presentation: Baden Offord

The humanities, arts and cultural studies have the potential to make us literate. They enable the human mind to contextualise and discover language(s) to connect lived experience with the wider social, cultural, scientific, economic, psychological and political worlds. In fact, the humanities and arts are more than enabling; they enrich and are essential to all our relations. But in these troubled times of pervasive and dominant pathologies of scientific, corporate, capitalist, militaristic and technocratic rationality, the humanities are being defunded, rejected and marginalized. Nothing could be more perilous at this pivotal time in the world. Global warming, the Covid-19 pandemic, a China–United States cold war, Black Lives Matter, a Great Depression 2020, displaced and dispossessed people, and rising suicide rates are just some of the immediate realities that can only be unflinchingly and qualitatively understood, questioned and critiqued through the humanities, arts and cultural studies.

In my presentation, I will argue that it is through studying the humanities that there exists the opportunity and imperative to self-examine, to become equipped to understand and investigate the challenging moral and ethical issues of our times. The humanities provide the creative, ludic and critical intellectual space to engage with the complexities of being. They offer windows into other ways of knowing and ways of being; they provide the tools for cultural encounters with difference; and they shake up realities to make them apposite. I will argue that such things are learned through the energies and efforts of philosophy, history, literature, religion, art, music, media, cultural studies and language — and we ignore them at our own peril. Now, as we witness the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement reverberating and resonating around the planet, we can observe the power of how lived experience, in this case derived from the historical and contemporary effects of colonialism, slavery and the subjugation of people based on race, upends the status quo and calls into question the very conditions in which we live, and to what extent we are complicit through our privilege and/or ignorance. Such questions are only possible through critical thinking, dissent and protest, seen in the ground and vitality of the humanities, arts and cultural studies. Nothing could be more relevant in uncertain and troubled times.

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Embracing Difference: The Work of Art
Panel Presentation: Emilienne Malfatto, Stephen Copland, Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio & Martin Renes

This plenary round table brings together three Western professionals from related yet different backgrounds: art history and theory; visual and media art; and documentary and art photography respectively. This multidisciplinary arts plenary was proposed upon Emilienne Malfatto’s reception of the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award for her 2019 photo-journalistic project on Iraqi children, which comments on the discursive regimes of gender, race, class, and religion that inform the contact between East and West, the old Imperial Metropole and its margins, the European Self and non-European Other. These were eloquently addressed in Edward Said’s postcolonial writings on the academic practice and material effects of Orientalism, which offered a deconstructive, post-structuralist critique of Western identity and allowed for its reconstruction in terms of cultural diversity. Now, four decades after the publication of his foundational study, we are once again confronted with an essentialist, exclusionary Fortress Europe that closes its borders to the Other, and we wonder as to why, how to turn the tide, and how to “embrace difference” in the spirit of the conference theme. What role can art play in this debate? Does an image always speak louder than words? Is art’s mediation of meaning always for the better? By the hands of three experts in art, cultural exchange, identity, migration, globalization, the Mediterranean and the Near-East, this round table aims to tackle these questions so as to find productive interfaces that places “the work of art” in a wider political, sociological, geographical and cultural perspective.

Panellists

Emilienne Malfatto
Stephen Copland
Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio
Martin Renes (moderator)

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Parenting Education Within Contexts of Vulnerability and Child Protection: Positive Parenting, Resilience and Vulnerability
Featured Presentation: Nuria Fuentes-Peláez

The purpose of this presentation is to reflect on parenting education in the context of child welfare and child protection from the perspective of two promising approaches, resilience and positive parenting. The family is the first context of socialisation for children and strengthening this is a priority if we are to avoid situations of social exclusion.

Parenting programmes help to empower parents as well as strengthening their parenting skills, thereby contributing to the construction of a form of parenting that is unique to their family but that is under the umbrella of children’s rights and child welfare. The development of positive parenting, together with the development of resilience, become protective or mitigating factors in situations of adversity, such as poverty or in prevention of abuse.

The experiments carried out by the research group GRISIJ (Grupo de investigación en intervenciones socioeducativas en la infancia y la juventud – Research group for social-educational interventions in childhood and adolescence) on the development and evaluation of parenting education within the framework of child protection and in situations of vulnerability, provide a good starting point for this reflection.

In light of evaluations of the educational programmes implemented, the participation in international projects, such as the GIFT Project (Growing in Family Today), and of society, which is becoming more and more diverse, we see the need to introduce a third point of reflection: diversity and how it is addressed in parenting programmes within the framework mentioned above.

Looking at the role of diversity in the context of educational programmes based on positive parenting and resilience may provide a platform to exchange perspectives to address a topic that is found within other areas of education.

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