Description

Catalan Biographies

The 29th German-Catalan Conference will place various facets of biographies at the centre of academic exchange in the area of Catalan Studies and beyond. Catalan language, literature, culture, history and society are strongly influenced by the biographical references of individual actors. Focusing on such references allows the reconstruction of fine-grained images of past and present realities of the Catalan-speaking areas.

We invite you to use the interdisciplinary potential of the study of biographies in history, culture and society, literature, language, didactics and translation to address topics that are oriented towards common questions to be worked on together by various sub-disciplines in Catalan Studies, such as the following:

• How are Catalan language, literature, culture and society experienced from the internal and external perspective as well as in transcultural networks? How do social and cultural science biographical research approaches give access to everyday cultures and to overarching social structures of meaning in the Catalan-speaking world? What place do references to the Catalan-speaking areas and their language have in biographies and their interpretations? To what extent are they part of life projects and perspectives on the future?
• Which insights to processes of linguistic-cultural identification and awareness as well as to the acceptance of (language) policy measures do biographical narratives provide? How does idiolectal language use change over the course of a person's life, e.g. in terms of grammatical coding and pragmatic staging of subjectivity?
• Are there typical linguistic biographies of multilingual Catalan speakers? How are language and culture passed on between generations and to new speakers of Catalan in an informal or institutionally controlled way? Which role does language teaching play in this process? Which role does Catalan play as an economic resource in employment biographies? Which role do biographical factors play in language choice in the context of Catalan multilingualism? To what extent do individual biographies shape the history of the Catalan-speaking communities and which biographical experiences are significant for generational understanding?
• How are "Catalan biographies" represented in literature, social sciences and the media, as well as in the aesthetic treatment of social conflictuality, migration experiences and diasporic references? What place does the digital space or the interplay between the analogue and the digital have in literary and multimodal mediatized forms of (auto-)biographical narration in literature and film? Questions of linguistic and, in a broader sense, cultural translation (including self-translation) can also be addressed against this backdrop.
• Which role do researchers' individual biographies play in the development of scholarly engagement with the various fields of research? How do researchers within and outside the Catalan-speaking areas find Catalan topics? How do their biographies shape institutional processes of research and teaching in Catalan Studies? Under this framework, the 29th German-Catalan conference can become a place of understanding about one's own research biographies as well.