Journeys

Catalog description

This colloquium takes as its touchstone the idea that movement, actual and imaginative, has historically generated knowledge and sharpened our ethical sensibilities. Drawing on literature, film, and theory across disciplines, historical periods, and geographic fields, it explores how journeys - and associated experiences such as pilgrimage, nomadism, adventure, slavery, imperialism, migration, exile, commerce, tourism, and climate change - provide narrative frames for human inquiry. What is the difference between travels and journeys? What difference does it make, then, when journeys are chosen vs. forced? How might depictions of journeys enact representational and even physical power and inequality over those they survey? How do journeys transform individual and group senses of self, others, home, and the world? How do encounters with unknown places and others prompt questions about comparison, difference, commensurability, and co-existence? What roles might translation and adaptation play in this process? Such questions suggest that journeys provide much more than the discovery of destinations and may, in fact, facilitate self-discovery in unexpected ways.