Navigating Epistemic, Cultural, and Legal Translations: Processes, Hierarchies, Spaces

Go to the preliminary program | Keynote lecture on 23 April (16:30) by Liliana Gómez | Keynote lecture on 24 April (11:00) by Lauri Mälksoo

This conference explores translation as a dynamic process shaping cultural, social, and legal exchanges. Beyond linguistic adaptation, translation involves the transformation of meanings, norms, and discourses across different contexts. From avant-garde movements to feminist activism and legal transplants, translation is an interactive and often contested process influenced by power hierarchies and historical legacies. 

Focusing on transregional entanglements - with contributions addressing the Americas, Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia - the conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines. The panels will address themes including travelling concepts and knowledge transfer in legal, political and cultural discourses and practices, narrating identities and the struggle for representation, and contestations over artistic movements.  

The keynote speakers will take up these themes, with Liliana Gómez addressing encounters between art, witnesses and civil society in the courtrooms of Balkan and Latin American (post)conflict societies. Lauri Mälksoo will examine role of international treaties in East-West relations, exploring the longer history of treaties involving Russia and European nations. A panel discussion on Area Studies as the Art and Science of Translation provides context for considering the central themes of the conference within an area studies framework. This field is crucial to the research done in Regensburg on the theoretical and empirical dimensions of translation and transfer in an interconnected world marked by frictions and turbulence. 

The event marks the concluding conference of the first funding phase (2019–25) and the opening of the second phase (2024–28) of the ScienceCampus.

Registration | Anmeldung:  Please complete this form by 31 March if you are not part of the conference programme, but would like to attend the opening day, including the reception, on 23 April. Registration to attend on 24-25 April only is not necessary.

Concept and organization:  Anne Brüske, Cindy Wittke, Rike Krämer-Hoppe, Jochen Mecke, Dagmar Schmelzer and Paul Vickers