Deadline: September 13, 2026
EXILE AS A FOREIGN BODY International Conference will be held 2–3 December 2026 at Université Paris Nanterre, Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique, Sorbonne Université, UMR 8224 Eur’ORBEM UXIL & Campus Condorcet
CALL FOR PAPERS
Concept and Rationale
This conference proposes to approach the experience of exile in the twentieth century through the lens of the body. The body is understood here as a point of intersection between the material conditions of existence, the institutional mechanisms that frame migration, and the cultural forms through which exile is lived and represented. This perspective seeks to complement approaches that have primarily examined exile through the lenses of memory, identity, cultural circulation, and intellectual transfer.
The exiled body is confronted with the demands of everyday life: finding housing, performing often precarious work, adapting to a new social environment, learning new habits, and rebuilding forms of sociability. At the same time, memory remains attached to lost places, temporalities, and forms of belonging, or to those reconstructed through remembrance. The experience of exile thus invites us to examine the complex relationships between the exiled body, memory, and institutions, as well as the tensions and reconfigurations that arise from their encounter.
This tension is also produced by the legal, administrative, and political frameworks to which every migrant is subject. The exiled body becomes an identified, documented, and controlled body, sometimes immobilised or displaced by administrative procedures, migration policies, or practices of surveillance. It thus constitutes not only an object of experience, but also an object of government, inscribed within institutions that organise possibilities of integration as well as forms of exclusion.
Particular attention will be given to twentieth-century migrations, and more specifically to the migratory waves of the 1920s and 1930s, a period during which new diasporic configurations and new regimes of mobility emerged, continuing to shed light on later migratory experiences.
Theoretical and Methodological Framework
Without imposing a single theoretical framework, the conference seeks to bring into dialogue several fields of research: the social and cultural history of exile, the sociology and anthropology of migration, legal history, literary and artistic studies, memory studies, and the study of material culture.
The reflection builds in particular on works devoted to the social frameworks of memory (Maurice Halbwachs), heterotopias and dispositifs of government (Michel Foucault), and cultural memory (Aleida Assmann). It also engages with historical and sociological research on the politics of exile and asylum, the administration of displaced populations, and the history of the “making of refugees,” notably in the work of Catherine Gousseff, Alexis Spire, Karen Akoka, and Michel Agier.
Exile is both a social and historical reality and an object of representation. Literary and artistic works, testimonies, correspondence, and archives reveal the many ways in which bodily experiences of exile are narrated, reworked, and remembered. The conference seeks to bring these different levels of analysis into dialogue by confronting approaches from the humanities and social sciences with literary, artistic, and cultural studies.
Breaking Down Disciplinary Boundaries
Particular attention will be given to research that places forms of representation of exile in dialogue with the historical realities that underpin them. Spaces of temporary residence — camps, hotels for émigrés, boarding houses, hostels, and other provisional forms of dwelling — may thus be studied in literary works, testimonies, or archives in relation to actual housing practices, reception policies, and the urban context of their time.
One of the main aims of this conference is to foster dialogue between approaches that often remain compartmentalised. The material, social, legal, and institutional dimensions of exile — working conditions, forms of dwelling, administrative statuses, migration policies, or practices of control — are frequently studied separately from their representations in literature, the arts, and testimonies. The conference aims to place these perspectives in relation to one another in order to illuminate the multiple dimensions of the experience of exile.
From this perspective, the study of the transposition of the material conditions of exile into literary texts goes beyond a purely aesthetic reading. The analysis of specific narrative strategies — whether Vladislav Khodasevich’s “double exposure,” Walter Benjamin’s “porosity” of experience, or Georg Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” — invites us to question the links between forms of representation of exile and social realities. Bringing literary works into dialogue with testimonies, archives, and other historical sources thus makes it possible to situate individual experiences of exile within the materiality of their social, urban, and institutional environment.
RESEARCH AXES
Discontinuities Between Body, Memory, and Imagination
The fragmentation of the experience of exile, understood as the rupture between the present of everyday life and the lost past. This division manifests itself through the superimposition of spaces and temporalities, in which past and present coexist. The displacements of memory—that is, its shifts and superimpositions—in relation to imagined or lost spaces. The relationships between bodily experience, individual and collective memory, diasporic imaginaries, identities, transmission, and cultural practices.
Dwelling in Exile: Heterotopias, Provisional Spaces, and Forms of Habitation
Hotels, boarding houses, temporary housing, retirement homes, wandering, hospitality, asylum applications. Places of exile understood as heterotopias, at the intersection of several regimes of space, memory, and belonging. Transformation of the provisional into the durable; reconstruction of everyday life; the body inhabiting a place while remaining traversed by other spaces, other temporalities, and other memories.
Social, Administrative, and Legal Dimensions
Exclusion and integration, control, identification, documentation, and the “management” of migrant bodies. Legal statuses and migration policies.
Work, Daily Discipline, and Practices of Self-Care
Paid and unpaid work, precarity, economies of survival, health, practices of self-care, daily discipline, and the reconstruction of forms of sociability.
Intimacy, Sexualities, Ageing, Illness, and Death in Exile
Gender, sexualities, parenthood, ageing, queer experiences, disability, illness, death, mourning, and funerary rites.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Working Languages
Papers may be presented in French or English.
Submission Guidelines
Proposals (title, abstract of no more than 300 words, and a short biographical note) may be submitted in either French or English.
Proposals should be sent by 13 September 2026 to the following addresses: ganthenbein@gmail.com and rozovae@parisnanterre.fr
Applicants will be informed of the selection results at the beginning of October 2026..
Travel and Accommodation Support
Subject to available funding, the organising committee may contribute to the cost of two hotel nights for a limited number of participants. Those wishing to request this support are invited to indicate this when submitting their proposal. Decisions will be communicated after the selection of papers, depending on the resources effectively available.