Imagining the Other
Theo-Political Challenges in an Age of Migration
This the theme of this year’s conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R), which will be held at the Theological Faculty of the University of Innsbruck from July 10-13, 2019.
We live in an age of – often forced – migration with its special challenges. How we imagine and how we image “the Other”, is a decisive element in the (theo-)politics of exclusion and desire that feed on these challenges. Aware that imagination is a mimetic process, the 2019 conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) wants to address these challenges by trying to illumine different aspects of this complex entanglement, asking whom or what we mean by “the other”: the stranger and migrant, the brother or sister, nature that envelops or defies us, the transcendent Other to whom religions refer or the other sex or gender …?
As this incomplete enumeration shows, Imagining the Other widens the conference’s range of topics beyond its stated theme of migration to other fields of interest for the Colloquium.
Scheduled subsections will include:
- Migration, ecology and economic justice
- Exclusion and the transcendent other
- Imaging the Other: The media coverage of migrants and refugees
- How do Europeans view the “Others”?
- …
For these and other topics we are looking forward to your paper or other proposals.
Please keep watching out, as we expand and complete these pages in the coming weeks, putting up plenary speakers, registration, and finally paper abstracts and the conference program.
For Information on travel, accommodation, plenary speakers, registration, and our optional cultural program click here to jump to the top of the page and then use the menu to the right.
Organizers: The Institute of Systematic Theology at the University of Innsbruck, coordinated by Nikolaus Wandinger and Dietmar Regensburger
Members of Academic Team: Wilhelm Guggenberger, Michaela Quast-Neulinger, Mathias Moosbrugger, Józef Niewiadomski, Wolfgang Palaver, Roman Siebenrock
Members of Administrative Team: Barbara Bertsch, Monika Datterl, Handan Öztürk, Roman Siebenrock, Johanna Stüger
Conference Contacts:
E-mail: cov-r2019@uibk.ac.at
Phone: +43-512-507-8581 or
Fax: +43-512-507-2761
Graciously co-sponsored by: 
Picture 1: "Migrants and refugees queue at a camp near Gevgelija" by Nikolay Doychinov, © AFP
Picture 2: Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference