To engage in political activism is to engage with the world in which one lives, to identify issues and injustices and to present a vision of a better future. Cultural production, including literature, film, visual media, and performance, represents an important medium through which activists can communicate political ideas both within their communities and networks and to wider audiences beyond their movements.
Over the past decades, an increasingly globalised world has offered activists new opportunities for communication and network-building, exemplified in prominent examples of transnational student, feminist, and anti-racist activism. Yet, emphasising the transnational contexts of political movements risks obscuring localised concerns, homogenising struggles, and overlooking marginalised voices.
This conference will explore how the potentials and limitations of transnationalism are addressed in activist cultural production. We take as a point of departure the concept of boundaries, understood in its broadest sense to include, among other examples, national borders, the boundaries between politics and art, junctures between political movements, generational divides, and cultural production across media.