IAFOR > The Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE) > BCE2022 Overview

BCE2022 Overview

Join us in Barcelona (and online) for BCE2022!

20–23 September, 2022 | University of Barcelona, Spain

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Welcome to The 3rd Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2022), held in partnership with the University of Barcelona, Spain, and the IAFOR Research Centre at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, Japan.

For those of you who were fortunate enough to attend an IAFOR conference before COVID appeared from over the horizon, you will remember the calibre of research presented, the thrill of listening to engaging keynotes, discussions with respected plenary speakers, and socialising with like-minded scholars from across the globe. The opportunity to not only meet with old friends from previous IAFOR conferences, but also to introduce new minds into your intellectual network.

So what about conferences under the “new normal” COVID restrictions in effect across the world? IAFOR saw very quickly that the online and hybrid conferences were the only way to keep the heart of the academic community beating, and adapted their activities to suit this rare situation with finesse. Of course, nothing can substitute the dynamism of in-person conferences, but the IAFOR online experience not only maintains the superb quality one expects of an IAFOR conference, it surpasses, by taking advantage of innovative and exciting and new formats that could only have been envisioned in the wake of a global crisis. How about a face-to-face conversation between two experts, writers, filmmakers, from countries thousands of miles apart? Experts who otherwise would have been unable to meet due to geographical or political adversities– a magnificent opportunity indeed.

There are more reasons than ever before to join BCE and BAMC in Barcelona. The era of the online and hybrid conference is strange and unfamiliar, but also revolutionary and liberating, opening doors and allowing its speakers’ words to be heard across the world.

The Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2022) will be held alongside The Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC2022), and many of the sessions will concentrate on areas at the intersection of education and the arts and humanities. In keeping with IAFOR’s commitment to interdisciplinary study, delegates at either conference are encouraged to attend sessions in other disciplines. Registration for either conference will allow delegates to attend sessions in the other. We expect the resultant professional and personal collaborations to endure for many years, and we look forward to seeing you in Barcelona and online!

– The BCE2022 Organising Committee

Isabel Alonso-Breto, University of Barcelona, Spain
Sue Ballyn, University of Barcelona, Spain
Montserrat Camps-Gaset, University of Barcelona, Spain
Joseph Haldane, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
Donald E. Hall, Binghamton University, USA
Baden Offord, Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
Maria Grau Perejoan, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
Cornelis Martin Renes, University of Barcelona, Spain
Caty Ribas-Segura, University College Alberta Giménez, Spain

IAFOR Journal of Education (Scopus Indexed Journal)

This conference is associated with the Scopus and DOAJ listed IAFOR Journal of Education.
 

Key Information
  • Venue & Location: University of Barcelona, Spain (and online)
  • Dates: Tuesday, September 20, 2022 ​to Friday, September 23, 2022
  • Early Bird Abstract Submission Deadline: May 03, 2022*
  • Final Abstract Submission Deadline: July 05, 2022
  • Registration Deadline for Presenters: August 09, 2022

*Submit early to take advantage of the discounted registration rates. Learn more about our registration options.

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Plenary Speakers

  • Isabel Alonso-Breto
    Isabel Alonso-Breto
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Ishmeet Kaur
    Ishmeet Kaur
    Central University of Gujarat, India
  • Mattia Mantellato
    Mattia Mantellato
    University of Udine, Italy
  • Kathleen Firth
    Kathleen Firth
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, United States
  • John McLeod
    John McLeod
    University of Leeds, United Kingdom
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Silvia Cuevas-Morales
    Silvia Cuevas-Morales
    Writer, Australia
  • Dolors Ortega
    Dolors Ortega
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Shirley Steinberg
    Shirley Steinberg
    University of Calgary, Canada
  • Adrien K. Wing
    Adrien K. Wing
    University of Iowa College of Law, United States

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Programme

  • Resilience is an Academic Job Requirement
    Resilience is an Academic Job Requirement
    Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall
  • Do We Look Back to Move Forward?
    Do We Look Back to Move Forward?
    Keynote Presentation: Shirley Steinberg
  • Attacks on Critical Race Theory
    Attacks on Critical Race Theory
    Keynote Presentation: Adrien K. Wing
  • The Arts, Literature and Dance: Multimodal and Embodied Approaches for a Resilient and Partnership World
    The Arts, Literature and Dance: Multimodal and Embodied Approaches for a Resilient and Partnership World
    Keynote Presentation: Mattia Mantellato
  • Adult Education and the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Lifelong Learning
    Adult Education and the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Lifelong Learning
    Keynote Presentation: Dolors Ortega
  • Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser
    Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser
    Keynote Presentation: John McLeod
  • Stories of Resilience and Strength
    Stories of Resilience and Strength
    Keynote Presentation: Ishmeet Kaur
  • A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales
    A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales
    Featured Interview: Silvia Cuevas-Morales & Sue Ballyn
  • Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story
    Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story
    Featured Interview: Gloria Montero & Joseph Haldane

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Organising Committee

The Organising Committee of The 3rd Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE) is composed of distinguished academics who are experts in their fields. Organising Committee members may also be members of IAFOR's International Academic Advisory Board. The Organising Committee is responsible for nominating and vetting Keynote and Featured Speakers; developing the conference programme, including special workshops, panels, targeted sessions, and so forth; event outreach and promotion; recommending and attracting future Organising Committee members; working with IAFOR to select PhD students and early career academics for IAFOR-funded grants and scholarships; and overseeing the reviewing of abstracts submitted to the conference.

  • Isabel Alonso-Breto
    Isabel Alonso-Breto
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Montserrat Camps-Gaset
    Montserrat Camps-Gaset
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, United States
  • Baden Offord
    Baden Offord
    Curtin University, Australia
  • Maria Grau Perejoan
    Maria Grau Perejoan
    University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
  • Cornelis Martin Renes
    Cornelis Martin Renes
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Caty Ribas-Segura
    Caty Ribas-Segura
    University College Alberta Giménez, Spain

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Review Committee

The BCE2022 Review Committee is now accepting submissions.

IAFOR's peer review process, which involves both reciprocal review and the use of Review Committees, is overseen by conference Organising Committee members under the guidance of the Academic Governing Board. Review Committee members are established academics who hold PhDs or other terminal degrees in their fields and who have previous peer review experience.

If you would like to apply to serve on the BCE2021 Review Committee, please visit our application page.

Apply to Join the Review Committee

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Isabel Alonso-Breto
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Isabel Alonso-Breto obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2003, where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. A scholar in the area of Postcolonial Studies, she has worked on authors of Caribbean, Canadian, Indian and South-African origin, while her present research focusses on literature and life writing by Sri Lankan authors, mostly of the diaspora. A visiting scholar in recent years at the Universities of Toronto (Canada) and Marburg (Germany), Dr Alonso-Breto has been the guest editor of several issues of academic journals such as Coolabah and Indialogs, and is the general editor of the miscellaneous journal Blue Gum. Also interested in the social role of creative writing and translation, she has several pieces to her credit in this regard. Lately she has translated into Spanish the anthology Siembra solo Palabras, by Sri Lankan Tamil poet Cheran, published in 2019. Dr Alonso-Breto is a member of Ratnakara, a research group devoted to the study of the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean, and the Vice-Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona.

Interview Session (2021) | Brexit, Borders and the Gibraltarian Voice: a Conversation With M.G.Sanchez

Previous BAMC Presentations

Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25th 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Featured Interview (2022): “A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales”
Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making. Since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and is Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within Osaka University.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Dr Haldane is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), a Visiting Professor at the School of Business at Doshisha University (Japan), where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA programme, and a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Education (USA), collaborating on the development of the Global PhD programme.

Dr Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office in collaboration with IAFOR.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Featured Interview (2022): Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Ishmeet Kaur
Central University of Gujarat, India

Biography

Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry (educationist, author and poet) teaches at the Centre for English Studies at Central University of Gujarat, India. She was recognised as an Inspired Teacher for the President of India’s in-residence program at Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi in June 2015. She has been largely interested in areas of literature of margins, studies of violence, trauma, and women studies. She has also been actively engaged in Comparative Studies and Translations from Punjabi into English. She is a member of the Global Guru Granth Sahib Translation project at Sikh Research Institute, United States. Her recent work has been on violence studies engaging with discourses on the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi. She is an editor of Black November: Writings on Anti-Sikh Massacres of 1984 and the Aftermath (2019); Patrick White: Critical Issues (2014); co-editor of Violence, Subversion and Recovery: Women Writers from the Sub-continent and Around (2019, with Rachel Bari) and the author of Texting the Scripture: Sri Guru Granth Sahib and the Visionary Poetics of Patrick White (2016). Her collection of poems is Forbidden Button and Other Poems (Signorina Publications, 2020)

Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry also engages in conducting talks on women's concerns, well-being and mindfulness. She firmly believes that in a world that is full of pressures, there is an innate energy within people. She engages in discourses on various aspects of spirituality, learnings from Guru Granth Sahib, and real-life memoirs. She has delivered lectures in various institutions and different countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, America, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Spain.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Stories of Resilience and Strength”
Mattia Mantellato
University of Udine, Italy

Biography

Mattia Mantellato holds a cum laude PhD (Doctor Europaeus) in English language and literatures from the University of Udine, Italy, Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Society, and he is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow working on the project “English Caribbean Literatures of the Ocean: Eco-Feminist and Transdisciplinary Perspectives for a New Blue Aesthetic”. He researches and publishes on: Derek Walcott’s work, World Literatures, English Literature, Performance and Dance Studies and Multimodal Studies. He is also a professional ballet dancer, choreographer and artist. He graduated from La Scala Ballet Academy in Milan. For seven seasons, he was part of the ensemble of the National Ballet Theatre of Prague (Czech Republic). He has performed in more than 10 countries in Europe, in China (EXPO 2010), at the Biennale of Venice and at Mittelfest.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “The Arts, Literature and Dance: Multimodal and Embodied Approaches for a Resilient and Partnership World”
Kathleen Firth
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

The Kathleen Firth Lecture has been periodically organised by the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies (CEAT) at the University of Barcelona since 2011, when Dr Kathleen Firth retired from her teaching and academic work at the University. Dr Firth had taken over Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at UB from Professor Doireann MacDermott, who in turn was instrumental in introducing Postcolonial Studies in Spain. Dr Firth is renowned as an international scholar in the field and worked in many areas, with a strong focus on research but was also deeply committed to expanding the teaching curriculum. While her emphasis was on the Caribbean and India, she also explored and introduced literature from Canada and from the African continent.

She led the postcolonial team at the University of Barcelona with enthusiasm and tireless work. At CEAT we are honoured to be able to offer these now traditional plenary lectures in her name. Together with the Doireann MacDermott Lectures, they are one of the hallmarks of CEAT activities.

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

John McLeod
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Biography

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He is the author of Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester UP, 2nd ed. 2010), and Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has edited special issues of the journals Kunapipi, Moving Worlds, and Études Anglaises, and is the co-editor of The Revision of Englishness (Manchester UP, 2004) and The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014). His essays have appeared in journals such as Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and ARIEL. He is an Executive Board Member of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) and co-editor of the Ohio State University Press series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture. In April 2022 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Paris Sorbonne, France. His new book, Global Trespassers, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser”
Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Featured Interview (2022): Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Keynote Presentation (2020): KNOCK KNOCK... WHO'S THERE?
Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Silvia Cuevas-Morales
Writer, Australia

Biography

Silvia Cuevas-Morales is a bilingual Australian writer of Chilean descent whose work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. After the 1973 military Coup d’état in Chile, her family was forced to flee the country and settled in Australia, where she completed her secondary and university studies, while teaching Latin American literature and Spanish language at La Trobe and Monash Universities. In 1999, she moved to Spain, where she has worked in the publishing world as an editor and literary translator, as well as collaborating with different newspapers and magazines as a freelance journalist.

Some of her published work includes: Purple Temptations (1994); Respiro de arena (1996); Sur/South Poem(a)s (1998); Al filo de la memoria/At memory's edge (2001); Canto a Némesis (2003); De la "A" a la "Z": Diccionario universal de autoras que escriben en castellano (2003); Vínculos Teatrales (2003); Rodaré maldiciendo (2008); Poliamora (2010); Diccionario de centenarias ilustres: 100 mujeres que cambiaron la historia (2011); Desarrelament y altres poemes / Desarraigo y otros poemas (2012); Nanas lésbicas: para conciliar el sueño (2013) Pienso, luego estorbo... / Je pense, donc je gȇne... (2014); El tren del miedo y otros relatos (2015) and Apátrida: Diario de un destierro/ Stateless: Diary of an Exile (2017).

Featured Interview (2022): “A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales”
Dolors Ortega
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Dolors Ortega Arévalo has been a lecturer of Literature in English at the University of Barcelona, Spain since the year 2010, teaching courses focused on Contemporary Fiction in English, Modernist and Postmodernist Literature in English, Medieval Literature, North American Contemporary Fiction, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Literatures, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She received her PhD from the University of Barcelona and she was awarded the European Doctorate Mention for her thesis "Deterritorialising Patriarchal Binary Oppositions: Deleuze, Woolf, Masculinities and Film Adaptation", after a year as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher under the supervision of Dr Humm at the University of East London, United Kingdom. Her research has focused mainly on Modernist writers, Gender Studies, Contemporary British Fiction, Film Adaptations, Postcolonial Literatures and the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. She has most recently been working on transnationalisms and hybridity and has published the prologue and only authorised annotated Spanish translation of F.S. Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (2014) as well as the prologue of F.S. Fitzgerald’s Cuentos Rebeldes (2018). She is a member of the consolidated research group Ratnakara with its current project “Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018-095648-B-I00). She has been a member of the academic committee of the MA “Construcció i Representació d’Estudis Anglesos” of “Facultat Filologia i Comunicació de la Universitat de Barcelona”, and is currently a member of the executive committee of “Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals (CEAT)” and the Head of Studies of CFA Rius i Taulet School for Adults in Barcelona.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Adult Education and the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Lifelong Learning”
Shirley Steinberg
University of Calgary, Canada

Biography

An innovative teacher educator and critical pedagogy scholar committed to diversity, inclusion, interdisciplinarity, and shared vision, Steinberg’s scholarship has contributed to the notions of Critical Multiculturalism and Diversity, Critical Bricolage, Critical Youth Studies, and Kinderculture. Her commitment to equity and social justice is internationally disseminated. She currently holds the Werklund Research Chair of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary. Steinberg is the author or editor of over 50 books and is the Whitworth Award Winner for Career Education Research Excellence 2019-2022. She is the director/writer of films relating to education and critical ways of knowing and is the winner of 17 festival awards for a collaborative film: Elders' Room, made with Kainai First Nation.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Do We Look Back to Move Forward?”
Adrien K. Wing
University of Iowa College of Law, United States

Biography

Dean Adrien K. Wing is the Bessie Dutton Murray Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, United States, where she has taught for 34 years. She is the Associate Dean for International and Comparative Law Programs, and the Director of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. Author of over 150 publications, she teaches Critical Race Theory, Sex Discrimination Law, and Law in the Muslim World. She is editor of Critical Race Feminism (NYU Press, 2003) and Global Critical Race Feminism (NYU Press, 2000). Recipient of many honours, she currently serves on the American Journal of International Law Board of Editors. Wing holds her Bachelor’s degree from Princeton with high honours, MA degree from UCLA in African Studies, and her Doctorate of Jurisprudence from Stanford Law School.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Attacks on Critical Race Theory”
Resilience is an Academic Job Requirement
Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

It is an understatement to note that the past two years have been debilitating for all of us in higher education. Masking mandates, remote teaching requirements, disrupted research plans, and curtailed travel to events such as the one we are holding now in Barcelona have sapped much of our optimism and sense of attachment to our students, colleagues, and institutions. To say the least, many of us feel burned out.

I want first to validate and honour that feeling of resilience depletion. I have experienced it myself as I have worked through university financial challenges, student crises, and a variety of personal disruptions. Nevertheless, I do love my job and I want to offer here a gentle nudge back for all of us toward renewal and re-attachment to our academic passions and toward a reignition of our intellectual/pedagogical enthusiasm. Colloquially, we have to find a way to “get over it.”

Indeed, burnout and cynicism are not at all unique to the pandemic and post-pandemic academic world. They have been endemic for decades and more. Twenty years ago, in one of my early books The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual, I noted the prevalence of feelings of “burn out” throughout higher education, and in that book I worked to frame it as an inexcusable failure to meet our core job responsibilities—to generate new ideas through our research and to position our students for success in their lives and intellectual journeys.

In this talk, I will glance at some of the ways that the academic cynicism enabling burnout had become something of a cottage industry even before the pandemic and why such self-indulgence is indefensible. The pandemic further enabled some of the worst excesses of pre-pandemic cynical thinking. We have active choices to make—and I will emphasise the conjoined empowerment and responsibility that go with that concept of “choice.” In returning to some of the early voices of transformational pedagogy, such as those of Paolo Freire and bell hooks, I offer a few reminders. We in academia, however frustrated we may be with health protocols and zoom-based interactions, have chosen and have been fortunate to secure a career of incredible privilege. We of privilege have an implicit employment contract in which our mission, and our core job requirement, is to change lives through our teaching and research. If we choose the self-indulgence of cynicism and burnout, rather than outward engagement, we are, quite frankly, not doing our jobs. And there are many enthusiastic and optimistic under-employed and unemployed individuals (graduate students, public intellectuals, post-docs and others) who, quite bluntly, have a better claim to the positions that we currently hold.

Read presenter's biographies
Do We Look Back to Move Forward?
Keynote Presentation: Shirley Steinberg

Bouncing Back, Back to Normal, Building Back

During the past 32 months, many have noted their desire to return to normal or create a “new normal”. A critical theoretical lens suggests that shedding romanticised notions of the past and old definitions of societal norms challenge us to consider making new ways in which to move forward after the global pandemic. How do we create a post-pandemic equitable, diverse, and inclusive world? How do we work with our students to not criticise the old, the past, and the "before" pandemic world but to use honest / reflective critique to articulate what must change to sustain the viability of our world? How do we educate for reality and reflection as to what didn’t work in those “norms” that we seem to be mourning?

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Attacks on Critical Race Theory
Keynote Presentation: Adrien K. Wing

Critical Race Theory started in the United States over 30 years ago. In the last two years, vicious attacks have started against it all over the world. Political forces in the United States in particular have attempted overtly or covertly to ban its use. More than 20 US states have passed laws restricting the teaching of certain principles that they claim are affiliated with CRT. The talk will help to shed light on the topic. What is CRT really? Why the upsurge on attacks? Should proponents of CRT fight back? What does this campaign against CRT mean for the future of discussion of race issues in the United States or elsewhere as well as broader freedom of speech issues?

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The Arts, Literature and Dance: Multimodal and Embodied Approaches for a Resilient and Partnership World
Keynote Presentation: Mattia Mantellato

In an ever-increasing divided reality, in which incomprehension and boundaries are putting at risk our innate human capacity for love, care and understanding, the Humanities are interested in investigating new transdisciplinary and intercultural dialogues for a more resilient and peaceful world (Riem & Hughes-d’Aeth, 2022). The encounter of scholarly-research with the praxis of media and the arts are in this respect fundamental for altering, revising and re-reading ‘canonical’ or Western-oriented epistemologies and thinking (Quijano, 2007; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) in light of a more complex, fluid and respectful partnership existence (Eisler, 1987; Eisler & Fry, 2019).

In my scholarly-artistic research, as both academic and dancer, I engage in multimodal projects with the intent of mingling together the poetic wor(l)d of post-decolonial writers from the ‘edge’ with the gestural, iconic and embodied language of dance (Schechner, 2013). This mixing of intertextual references and corporeal allusions allows my productions to bring to the fore new and unfathomed perspectives for both practitioners and viewers with the aim to traverse disciplinary boundaries and embrace a new opaque (Glissant, 1997) and much needed exchange of possibilities, an unexpected intersectional remapping of critical inquiry that destabilises, interrogates, proposes…

In this presentation I will focus on my last ongoing production based on David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994), a long narrative poem in which the Guyanese author questions the representation of drowning black bodies in J.M.W. Turner’s notorious painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840). My solo dance embodies Dabydeen’s complex depiction of Turner, who becomes simultaneously the painter, the slave, the stillborn, the human who constantly changes his skin in order to become oppressor and oppressed, persecutor and victim, black and white. Dabydeen’s poem highlights a tidalectic discourse (Brathwaite, 1992) on the role of Western-European imperialism, thus allowing us to revive our Atlantic archive in a more feminine and partnership-oriented dimension.

The presentation will follow an “undisciplined” (Benozzo, 2010) form of enquire, debating first on Dabydeen’s poem and writing, following the presentation of the ongoing process of the intermedial adaptation, to end with a live embodied extract of the dance performance.

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Adult Education and the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Lifelong Learning
Keynote Presentation: Dolors Ortega

The specific objectives of adult education in Spain consist of developing programs and courses related to specific educational needs for excluded groups, as well as to develop people’s capacity to participate in social, cultural and political events within the paradigm of lifelong learning. However, what the following paper intends to claim is that the solution is not to integrate them or make them fit in the structure that oppresses them. What is required is to offer them a critical and reflexive education, and a pedagogy which liberates them to understand the nature of their oppression and act upon their vulnerability so as to transform it.

Adult education environments might potentially become unique spaces for social encounters and transformation, where a wide range of diversity of people build a network of effects by deluding the privilege-oppression matrixes and by raising awareness of alternative understandings of interdependence, by means of service-learning and active participation of its members, within the learning community. Our discussion will stem from a brief genealogy of adult education in Catalonia, to analyse the demands and challenges of the pedagogy of the oppressed of the 21st century within the framework of adult education. In order to do so, this paper will take CFA Rius i Taulet School for Adults as an example of an attempt to generate learning contexts which work towards a progressive social change.

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Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser
Keynote Presentation: John McLeod

Circuits of permission and prohibition have long regulated human mobility, but ever more so today in an increasingly portable and checkpointed world system. In this presentation, I consider the recent literary and cultural representation of mobility with particular reference to those funnels and fictions of sanctioned motion in which only selected subjects – the 'good' immigrant, the compliant arrivant, et al. – are certified as legitimate. What happens when those figures granted leave to remain in the ambiguous environs of neoliberal consumption refuse to accept the prefabricated constraints of their compliance? How might their uncommissioned behaviour refuse the ever-shifting line between licensed and illegitimate life? Or in other words: what happens when we trespass beyond the lines that tell us where, and who, we are meant to be? I will explore the ways in which recent literary and cultural texts are mobilising this figure of the 'trespasser', as I term it, in order to ask critical questions about the extent to which the predominant constraints of transpersonal relations can be effectively exposed, challenged, and firmly resisted by those who appear to refuse their readied place.

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Stories of Resilience and Strength
Keynote Presentation: Ishmeet Kaur

Leo Tolstoy remarked in War and Peace that “the two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” This statement stands true for all times, particularly in times of crisis. While time has its power, it can be equally destructive as well as healing; patience is the key to surviving time. Belonging to a family that witnessed the violence of the partition of India, followed by the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres and other situations of violence and war, COVID-19 has added a new experience – surviving during the pandemic. Thus, for the family, there have been phases of trauma and revival followed by repeated critical situations and revival from them. Every experience became a strength story, when the most stressful times were countered with hope and faith. It is true that distress is also the birth of undeterred hope and faith.

How is one expected to contemplate and make sense of the different times of turbulence and upheaval? What efforts can one make to recover from setbacks and adversity? How does one reconcile with loss?

The present paper focuses on answering these questions through various narratives and stories witnessed during the pandemic. The extraordinary strength that people showed in the worst of situations, as India witnessed poor labourers migrating to their homes at the outbreak of the pandemic; the widening gap of untouchability, not just in terms of caste but also in terms of social barriers and medical distances; breakdown of health care machinery; increase in suicides and mental stress; challenges met by students and educationists; and the farmers protest against the agriculture laws that turned into a full movement. At the same time, a lot of people and organisations came forward and made attempts to take charge of themselves and move on at individual levels that opened up different opportunities in the midst of the crisis. This paper focuses on how these experiences are case-studies of the invisible people who have created history of their own times.

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A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales
Featured Interview: Silvia Cuevas-Morales & Sue Ballyn

It would not be an untruth to say that Silvia was born into resistance. In 1975, at the age of thirteen, she and her parents had to flee Pinochet’s Chile to take up residence in Australia. It is true, however, that Silvia has spent all of her adult life in “resistance mode”. She has been an activist on many fronts and outstanding on the feminist front in Spain, an advocate for human rights, social, judicial, and sexual rights. The list is long. If you are looking to find her, search in the trenches of resistance!

Silvia found in poetry the voice through which to express her criticism of a humanity at odds with itself, her indignation at sexual, political and social injustice, her anger at all kinds of abuse, at racism. She voices, in Spanish or in English, what is so often silenced in our society, forcing her reader to travel with her through dark, shadowed streets, and is implacable in her search for a better world.

This conversation will take us through some of Silvia’s work and, most importantly, will allow us to meet the passionate human behind the words.

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Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story
Featured Interview: Gloria Montero & Joseph Haldane

As a novelist, Gloria Montero is well aware how through our stories, we learn about the world, about each other, and even about ourselves. And remembering how Henry James once said that “everyone has a story if they are able to tell it”, she talks to Dr Joseph Haldane to learn what led a schoolboy growing up in Brighton, England to teach in France, then Japan, and then on to be the Founder, Chairman and CEO of The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), the Interdisciplinary Think Tank, based in Japan. A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Professor Haldane's research and teaching at institutions world-wide covers history, politics, international affairs and education, as well as governance and decision making.

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Isabel Alonso-Breto
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Isabel Alonso-Breto obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2003, where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. A scholar in the area of Postcolonial Studies, she has worked on authors of Caribbean, Canadian, Indian and South-African origin, while her present research focusses on literature and life writing by Sri Lankan authors, mostly of the diaspora. A visiting scholar in recent years at the Universities of Toronto (Canada) and Marburg (Germany), Dr Alonso-Breto has been the guest editor of several issues of academic journals such as Coolabah and Indialogs, and is the general editor of the miscellaneous journal Blue Gum. Also interested in the social role of creative writing and translation, she has several pieces to her credit in this regard. Lately she has translated into Spanish the anthology Siembra solo Palabras, by Sri Lankan Tamil poet Cheran, published in 2019. Dr Alonso-Breto is a member of Ratnakara, a research group devoted to the study of the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean, and the Vice-Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona.

Interview Session (2021) | Brexit, Borders and the Gibraltarian Voice: a Conversation With M.G.Sanchez

Previous BAMC Presentations

Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25th 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Featured Interview (2022): “A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales”
Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making. Since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and is Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within Osaka University.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Dr Haldane is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), a Visiting Professor at the School of Business at Doshisha University (Japan), where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA programme, and a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Education (USA), collaborating on the development of the Global PhD programme.

Dr Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office in collaboration with IAFOR.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Featured Interview (2022): Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Montserrat Camps-Gaset
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Montserrat Camps-Gaset (Barcelona 1958) graduated in Classical Philology at the University of Barcelona in 1980. Her MA thesis on Maleficent Women in Archaic and Classical Greece won the Faculty prize. In 1985, she read her PhD thesis on Ancient Greek Festivals. In 1982, she also graduated in Theology in Barcelona. In 1989, she became Senior Lecturer at the Barcelona University. In 1992 and 1993, she went to the University of Leipzig thanks to a special development program of the DAAD for East Germany universities.

Apart from Catalan and Spanish, her native tongues, she speaks English, French and German fluently, has a good knowledge of Italian and Modern Greek and a basic level of Russian. Her main interests are Mythology, First Christianism, Early Byzantine authors, and Classical Tradition. Her interests include folklore, women studies and national identity.

She has translated many works from Greek, German and Modern Greek into Catalan. She is currently working on the Catalan edition of Plato’s Laws in four volumes, and on a Catalan version of the Corpus Hermeticum. She has also translated books for children and youngsters from English and German into Catalan and Spanish. In 2013, she taught a Seminar on Literary Translation at the University of Leipzig.

She has published a book in French on Ancient Greek Festivals, and papers on Ancient Greek Religion, Women Studies, Mythology and EarlyChristianism, as well as Classical Tradition in modern writers. In 1998, she published a book of poetry.

At Barcelona University, she has been Head of the Greek Department (2001-2004) and Dean of the Philological Faculty (2004-2008), and has participated on the University Board for many years. She is a member of several societies for Classical Studies and for Literature, such as the Catalan Pen Club.

Since 2008, she is a member of the CEAT’s Executive Committee. Thinking that academic activity must also include an engagement in communicating with a broader audience, she has undertaken the honour of codirecting the Centre as a new academic challenge for developing its capacity of producing and sharing knowledge.

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Baden Offord
Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Baden Offord is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Curtin University, Australia. Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand of Māori and Pākehā heritage, he has lived most of his life in Australia, as well as several years in Spain, South India, and Japan. An internationally respected scholar in human rights, education, sexuality and culture, his latest book (co-edited with Fleay, Hartley, Woldeyes and Chan) is Activating Cultural and Social Change: The Pedagogies of Human Rights (London, Routledge: 2022).

Professor Offord has held academic appointments as the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights in the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University (2015-2020); as Chair (Visiting Professor) of Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific and American Studies at The University of Tokyo (2010-2011); as Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona; and as Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University (1999-2014). He has also had visiting positions at Indiana University, the University of Auckland, and La Trobe University. In 2021 he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO) ‘for distinguished service in tertiary education in the field of human rights, social justice and cultural diversity.'

Professor Offord is a member of IAFOR’s Academic Governing Board. He is Chair of the Cultural & Area Studies section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Keynote Presentation (2021): Engaging with Culture: A Conversation on Decolonising the Future

Previous BCE Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2020): The Relevance of the Humanities and Arts in Uncertain Times
Maria Grau Perejoan
University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

Biography

Maria Grau Perejoan is a Lecturer in the Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Languages at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. She holds a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies with an emphasis on Caribbean Literature and Literary Translation from the University of Barcelona, and an MPhil in Cultural Studies from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Her primary research is in Caribbean Literature and Literary Translation and she has published book chapters and articles in national and international journals on both areas. In 2020 she co-edited and co-translated the award-winning bilingual anthology of contemporary Caribbean women poets, The Sea Needs No Ornament / El mar no necesita ornamento (Peepal Tree Press, 2020).

Cornelis Martin Renes
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Cornelis Martin Renes graduated from the University of Barcelona with a BA in 2001, an MA in 2006 and PhD in 2010. He joined the English and German Philology staff in 2001. His main teaching areas have been English poetry from the Renaissance to contemporary times, and postcolonial studies with a special emphasis on the Asia-Pacific area and Australia in particular. He wrote his thesis on indigenous Australian literature and identity formation. He co-directs the Australian Studies Centre at the university, which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Centre in 2000. Since the 2000s his main area of research has been indigenous Australian literature, and more recently he has become a member of a research project, POCRIF, which looks at postcolonial crime fiction and is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. He currently holds the positions of Adjunct Lecturer, Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, and Member of the EASA (European Association for Studies of Australia) Board. He maintains steady contact with Australian academia through visiting fellowships.

Panel Presentation (2020): Embracing Difference: The Work of Art
Caty Ribas-Segura
University College Alberta Giménez, Spain

Biography

Dr Caty Ribas-Segura graduated from the University of Barcelona with a BA in English Philology in 2003, an MA in English Studies in 2005 and a PhD in Australian Literature in 2013. She joined the Languages Department at University College Alberta Giménez (CESAG) (Palma de Mallorca) in 2006, a college which is now part of Comillas Pontifical University (UP Comillas). Currently, she is the university’s Research Coordinator, teaches English at the faculties of Education, Communication and Sports Science and, since 2013, has also managed the English Language School. Her research focuses on Greek and Chinese migrant literature in Australia and historical and contemporary crime fiction in Australia. She is a member of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona and of the research group TransLit at the University of Oviedo. She is the coordinator of the Postcolonial Studies panel at AEDEAN (Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies) conferences, the main Spanish association for English Studies. She was a member of the ministry-funded research project POCRIF: Postcolonial Crime Fiction (2014-2017). She has published more than twenty texts, participated in more than thirty national and international congresses and been a guest speaker in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Spain and Thailand.

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