New conference: Myths about the other in the Balkans - February 24 - 27, 2011

The Department of Balkan, Slavic and Eastern Studies (Macedonia University of Thessaloniki) in collaboration with Via Egnatia Foundation organizes an International Conference to be held in Thessaloniki in February 2011.

We shall have the opportunity to explore past and present myths constructed and performed by the Balkan peoples in their attempt to deal with otherness within and beyond their familiar environment.

What primarily interests us is otherness as it is related to national self or ethnic status, as well as otherness engendered by religious, cultural and gender differentiation. We are also interested in practices related to otherness in the premodern world; such practices were negotiated within traditional structures and by historical minorities, but can also be identified in the contemporary, post-cold-war period, as well as the era of globalization and economic migration.
A central question to be asked is how difference is represented and managed as a feeling of otherness through the myth histories, folk tales and folk songs, legends and oral traditions, literary works, films and the media, in jokes and comic strips, generally speaking in every form of verbal or non verbal narration.

Read more about the conference and the call to participate and to contribute with lectures.