1st International Congress Cultures in Movement
Runs from October 27 to 29, at the Faculty of Arts and Letters.
As it is suggested, from the very beginning, by the name chosen for this 1st International Congress of Culture: Cultures in Motion, it intends to handle culture as a simultaneously unique – Culture – and plural – Cultures phenomenon. In fact, the singularity and plurality result from the dialectic which, since its own origin, is inherent to each culture: on one side, it is the difference that seeks to escape the identity and thus ensures its own identity; on the other hand, it is the identity that seeks to abolish the differences, thus assuming itself as hegemonic difference.
However, even though globalization is considered today as a kind of an historical fatality, it is not an historical fatality the hegemony of one culture over others. Culture has always been a space open to struggles, exchanges, negotiations – and we don't foresee any reasons to not continue to be so.
And, in this age of increasingly global flows, in which the story no longer moves at the speed of the boots of seven leagues of which Hegel talked about but literally at the speed of light, each of the cultures was caught in a kind of vortex, of spiral motion, which makes everything tend to become liquid, to make use of the term popularized by Bauman.
No wonder, thus, that culture has become a topic and a central problem of our times. This centrality is also revealed in the thematic areas of this Congress, which include development, technology, cultural policies, the media, art, creative industries or gender and sexuality. Each of these areas will certainly provide a good situation to discuss tendencies such as hegemony and counter-hegemony, change and conservation, interchange and isolation, conflict and dialogue.
Interchange and dialogue are key words here, in first place due to the origins of this Congress, which appears as one of the activities of academic and scientific cooperation that has been being built over the last years, including the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Beira Interior (by means of its Degree in Sciences of Culture) and the Institute of Humanities, Arts and Sciences of Federal University, Bahia.
However, although the Organization of the Congress speaks Portuguese, the Portuguese language should not be seen as a factor of exclusion of other languages and cultures.
