CALL FOR PAPERS: LIVED EXPERIENCES IN CONTESTED PLACES: GOVERNANCE AND HUMANITARIANISM, 11-12 March 2027
The Taube Centre for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences at the Jagiellonian University, the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict at the Queen’s University Belfast invite submissions for the international workshop Lived Experiences in Contested Places: Governance and Humanitarianism to be held on 11-12 March 2027 at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
Keynote speakers
- Ivan Gusic, Department of Government, Upsalla University
- Tom Scott-Smith, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
The workshop brings together two bodies of research that have largely developed in parallel, focusing on two forms of contestation that are usually studied separately: places whose territory, authority, or identity is contested, including divided cities, disputed regions, segregated territories, and borderlands; and people whose mobility, status, or belonging is contested, including migrants, displaced populations, and returnees, as well as the spaces they inhabit and navigate, from cities and neighbourhoods to different forms of accommodation, including camps, shelters, reception centres, and other supposedly temporary settings. The workshop’s distinctive contribution lies in examining shared governance challenges across these different forms and spaces of contestation, rather than treating conflict, peacebuilding, diversity, humanitarianism, and governance as separate issues. Our central premise is that, despite the very different origins of contestation, these settings can produce similar everyday governance challenges: insecurity and violence, precarious living conditions, unequal access to services, parallel systems of provision, legitimacy disputes, and limited participation and representation.
We particularly encourage submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
• lived experiences of governance, its challenges, and forms of resistance across contested substate settings, including municipalities, cities, neighbourhoods, borderlands, camps, shelters, reception centres, and other local or regional spaces;
• everyday peace practices employed by people in these contested spaces to navigate, prevent, or de-escalate conflict and violence and promote peace;
• how people in contested spaces navigate fragmented, overlapping, or contested systems of authority and provision, negotiate status and belonging, and access or circumvent formal and informal institutions and services, including formal and informal systems of governance;
• informal networks, responses to exclusion or unequal treatment, and intra and extra group dynamics.
• creative and cultural practices through which people express, negotiate, or contest exclusion, belonging, identity, and governance and foster peace, including art and other forms of cultural expression and research methodologies.
Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit their work for consideration for publication in a potential special issue to be guest edited by the workshop organisers.
We invite abstracts of approximately 300 words and a short biography of 100 words to both aleksandra.zdeb@uj.edu.pl and fabricio.carrijo@uj.edu.pl
IMPORTANT DATES
- Deadline for abstract submission: 11 December 2026
- Notification of acceptance: 21 December 2027
- Submission of draft article: 05 March 2027
- Workshop: 11-12 March 2027
We particularly encourage submissions from women, early-career scholars, and researchers based in regions and institutions that are underrepresented in international academia. We welcome contributions from a wide range of geographical, institutional, and disciplinary contexts and especially value perspectives that are often marginalized within dominant academic debates.
For more details, refer here
