Encounters Across Borders

Encounters Across Borders is an interdisciplinary symposium exploring how migration, displacement and mobility reshape religious life, material culture and the spaces in which communities meet. Bringing together scholars, artists and creative practitioners, the event invites contributions that examine how boundaries are negotiated, challenged and reimagined across different social, political and religious contexts.

Call for Papers

The event is the third in its series. Over the past three years, our collaborative project has worked on the theme of religious coexistence and place, examining how encounters between religious traditions are manifested in and hosted by space. Across our symposia, meetings, travelling exhibitions, and the development of an edited volume, we have approached coexistence through space, materiality, embodiment and creative practice. The first event, Religious Co-existence: Embodied Interaction in Shared Spaces and Faith Practices, examined how religious difference is negotiated through bodily practice and spatial proximity within shared sacred sites. The second, Interreligious Encounters and Creative Practice, extended this inquiry by integrating creative practitioners, artists, designers, and filmmakers alongside researchers and educators, asking how encounter is mediated through image, sound, performance, and curated space.

This third event, Encounters Across Borders: A Multi-faith Response to Mobility and Conflict, seeks to bring religious coexistence into conversation with mobility, migration, and conflict. It is attentive to what happens during the relocation or dislocation of populations, as well as to their experiences upon arrival in places shaped by different religious histories, majorities, and spatial conventions. It also considers how the everyday work of settling, adapting, and living with others involves negotiating both visible and invisible barriers. It seeks to unfold different types of boundaries, liminal events, and threshold conditions where encounters are enabled and open to diverse relational interpretations.

Migration, displacement, and ordinary movement do not suspend coexistence; they reconfigure its terms. Practices travel and are re-situated, objects acquire new meanings, neighbourhoods and institutions are remade, and what begins as temporary arrangement can become a durable form of shared life. Under conditions of motion, religious coexistence demands attention not only to declared positions, but to transit and settlement, to the infrastructures that host people, and to the material work through which presence is re-established - sometimes quietly, sometimes under strain.

Religious life travels with people, whether they are journeying or arriving in a new land. At the time of departure, they must decide what to take with them, and during the journey they must preserve these material and immaterial elements in constantly changing circumstances. Upon arrival, people negotiate settlement through interactions with the local landscape and its inhabitants. Mobility thus offers a fundamental and essential - but often overlooked - arena in which cultural life is constantly reconfigured, and where boundaries, ownership, and power relationships are continually renegotiated.

This call invites contributions that respond (but are not limited to) to the following questions:

1. How does coexistence emerge during patterns of movement, displacement, and settlement?
2. What role does mobility play in the social, material, and spatio-temporal negotiation of encountering others?
3. How are situations of difference or conflict, integral parts of moving coexistence, become materially expressed during displacement and settlement?
4. In what ways can mobility and the subsequent reshaping of space experienced, be illuminated, traced, and documented?
5. How do religious encounters in movement involve the constant negotiation of visible and invisible boundaries?’
6. How can creative practice become a catalyst in negotiating these issues?
7. How and why do people misconstrue differences with conflict?

This is an opportunity to contribute to a research-driven dialogue on religious coexistence. We welcome creative voices that engage with these themes in meaningful and innovative ways.

Keynote Speakers

Professor Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge

Wendy Pullan is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge where she was Head of the Department of Architecture 2014-17. She is currently Director of the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research at Cambridge. Professor Pullan has published widely on European and Middle Eastern architecture and cities, examining the processes of urban heritage, conflict and change, both historical and contemporary. Her recent publications include: Locating Urban Conflicts (2013), The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (2013) and Architecture and Pilgrimage 1000-1500: Southern Europe and Beyond (2013). She is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

Dr Charlotte Veal, Newcastle University

Dr Charlotte Veal is an interdisciplinary scholar working across landscape studies and planning, human geography, security studies, and performance studies. Her research examines how landscapes, people and more-than-humans, and security practices intersect, while also developing innovative social research methodologies grounded in creative, embodied, and participatory approaches. Her work coheres around four interconnected areas of inquiry: Borderscapes, Geopolitics & Lived Experience, Multispecies Relations, Verticality, Gravity & Airspace, and Creativity, Performance & the Geohumanities. 

Professor Brandon Hamber, Ulster University

Professor Brandon Hamber is the John Hume and Thomas P. O’Neill Chair in Peace based at the International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) at Ulster University. He is also a member of the Transitional Justice Institute at the university, and is an Honorary Professor of the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.  He has consulted to a range of community groups, policy initiatives and government bodies in Northern Ireland and South Africa.  He has undertaken consulting and research work, and participated in various peace and reconciliation initiatives in Liberia, Mozambique, Bosnia, the Basque Country and Sierra Leone, among others. He has written extensively on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the psychological implications of political violence, masculinity, and the process of transition and reconciliation in South Africa, Northern Ireland and abroad.  He has published some 30 journal articles, over 25 book chapters and 4 books.

Guided Tour: Hidden Barriers - Encountering Visible and Invisible Borders in Belfast Dr David Coyles

This mobile keynote takes the form of a ‘bus tour and talk’. It offers an alternative journey through Belfast, exploring the visible and invisible boundaries that continue to shape everyday life in a post-conflict city. Travelling through north, east and west Belfast, participants will encounter a series of Hidden Barriers: sites where housing, roads, commercial developments and landscape interventions have become entwined with histories of division. Moving beyond the city's well-known peace walls, the tour reveals the unseen ways in which ordinary elements of the built environment continue to profoundly shape and influence patterns of mobility, encounter and coexistence between neighbouring Catholic and Protestant communities.

 

Registration Fees

Upon acceptance of your submission we will provide further details of how to register and pay your attendance fee. Details of the fees are noted below. 

	Registration fees include the guided tour and evening dinner
Student	£80
Standard	£120

 

Collaborators and Organisers

Organisers

Dr David Coyles, Ulster University

Dr Christos Kakalis, Newcastle University

Dr George Tsourous, Newcastle University

Collaborators

Newcastle University (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape)

Religions for Peace UK 

Ulster University (Belfast School of Architecture and the Built Environment)