Feb 06 - "Borders And Identities" International Conference Comes To The Garrison
Bordering on Britishness, an ESRC funded oral history project on Gibraltarian identity, will present its findings in a final conference at the Gibraltar Garrison Library on the 24th and 25th of February.
The purpose of this conference is to discuss our findings with other scholars who have done research on Gibraltar, while opening up the discussion to a more comparative dimension with international experts who have worked on similar areas of study.
About the project: Bordering on Britishness is an oral history project on Gibraltarian identity funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council in association with the Garrison Library of Gibraltar (HM Government of Gibraltar) and the University of Essex. The project has conducted close to 400 interviews with people living in Gibraltar and across the border, in the Spanish neighbouring town of La Línea de la Concepción. By giving voice to locals from diverse ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds, our findings explore the ways in which the inhabitants of Gibraltar – today a British Overseas Territory – have developed an explicitly British Gibraltarian national identity over the last century.
A statement continued: “We thus attempt to deconstruct the complex political, social and cultural processes through which a distinct “Gibraltarianness” arose as a national identity different from that of its Spanish neighbours – and, to a lesser extent, from that of the British. By concentrating on the physical and less tangible borders structuring social life in this small territory, we explore, from interdisciplinary perspectives, how a multilingual community has transformed itself into an almost monolingual one with Gibraltarians progressively abandoning the use of Spanish over the last half century; or how the closure of the border connecting and separating Gibraltar to and from Spain, a border which was closed under Franco from 1969-1975 and then under a democratic Spain from 1975-1985, have all served as platforms for Gibraltarians to imagine themselves as ‘more British than the British’.” Further information: http://borderingonbritishness.net/
About the conference: The Bordering on Britishness final conference (Borders and Identities: Languages and Ethnicities in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean World in the 20th Century) will gather 17 international experts who have researched on Gibraltar or similar communities. The papers will be exploring areas such as colonialism and postcolonialism; sociolinguistics; cultural and national identities; etc.
Dr Joseph Garcia, Deputy Chief Minister of Gibraltar, will open the conference on Friday, 24th February 2017. The conference will be open to the public. This conference has been made possible with a grant from the Ministry of Culture, HM Government of Gibraltar. A full-programme can be found on: http://borderingonbritishness.net/conference/
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