18 January 2018
In February 2018 a collection of papers from the Australian Society for French Studies 2016 Conference will be published in a special issue of the French Cultural Studies journal. This international and fully peer reviewed journal is designed to respond to the important changes that impact the study of French culture, language and society in all sections of the education system.
The special edition is edited by Natalie Edwards (University of Adelaide), Chris Hogarth (UniSA) and Gemma King (ANU). The Australian Society for French Studies 2016 Conference was held at UniSA with financial support from several organizations, including the Embassy for France in Australia and the EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations, and Cultural Transformations at UniSA, which also provided indispensable staff help in organizing the event. The Society had planned to pay for a speaker to come from overseas to give a plenary lecture, as well as ask an Australia-based academic in Francophone Studies to provide another keynote speech, as is often the practice at this conference (and was done in 2017). The support we received from the EU Centre allowed us to fund the travel of Professor Charles Forsdick to Adelaide, and thus to expand our budget in order to fund another project we had been considering for some time. Professor Nicholas Hewitt of the University of Nottingham, the editor-in-chief of the renowned journal French Cultural Studies had expressed an interest in coming to our conference, inviting a speaker from the US to give a keynote, and to sponsor some panels which could be linked to a future publication.
We were pleased to have the financial means to take him up on his offer, and the special issue (the first to be edited by Australia-based academics in the journal’s 28 year history) is a result of presentations on the two panels that FCS sponsored, as well as two more outstanding papers that were presented at the conference and then expanded. As we had already planned an issue of The Australian Journal of French Studies entitled “Mobility and Migration” (to which the Centre-sponsored Professor Forsdick is writing an afterword) we decided to focus our edition of FCS on mobility across several media, including film, literature, visual art and advertising. Articles explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world. http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/frca/29/1
