International conference: "Communication and social justice" Post-colonial narrations

Gabriele d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara and Alma Mater University of Bononia,in collaboration with University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, Universityof Sao Paulo and Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, have invited scholars to participate ina conference on the subject of “Communication and social justice: postcolonialnarrations”. The aim of the conference is to investigate theoretical and contemporaryissues concerning the relationship between sociology of communicative processes andpost-colonial studies, with particular regard to innovative narrations engendered by thetransition from traditional representations to digital relations.

The title of the conference, “Communication and social justice: postcolonial narrations”,hints at the opportunity to analyse studies and researches probing the narrationsfocused on equality of rights, diversity and solidarity through the lens of sociology,communication and literature. To the fore is the contribution provided by “Southernepistemologies” (Boaventura de Souza Santos) to the renewal of postcolonial studiestradition. Postcolonial theory, born and developed in the Anglophone sphere in the1970s, has recently grown in prominence in academic environment where a focus onEuropean postcolonialism, referring also to studies on England, Spain, France, Holland,Belgium, Portugal and Italy’s former African, Indian and American colonies, hasflourished.

This conference intends to explore postcolonialism as a fluid concept by conceiving ofit as a model for research and criticism focused on a variety of colonial practices, bothpast and present. For this reason the title of the conference refers to narrativepostcolonialisms in the plural and we invite contributions that explore a diverse rangeof matters to which postcolonial theory and criticism could productively be applied tothe tenet of social justice: European colonisation of foreign territories, contemporarypost-coloniality, internal colonialism during unification, postcolonial dynamics inreference to immigration, the interaction between European postcolonialism and othercountries or cultural contexts, developments in postcolonial theory and postcolonialpractices throughout the modern era.