Quarantaine

Quarantine: History, Heritage, Place

14-16 August 2014

The Quarantine Station, Sydney, Australia

We invite abstracts from historians, geographers, heritage scholars and archaeologists for papers on: place-making and place-marking quarantine and dark tourism graffiti and incarceration shrine creation in places of isolation heritage, materiality and immateriality traces and spaces of disease landscapes of quarantine.

Please send 300 word abstract + short CV for consideration to Peter Hobbins

Deadline: 16 September 2013

The practice of quarantine has always been grounded in contested locations. The history and heritage of quarantine stations and places of isolation the world over remain in these landscapes, as built environments and in artefacts. In this way, sites of segregation have been both enduring and ephemeral. These vestiges intersect in powerful ways with memory and history, but what is being invoked? Who – or what – were the actors bound up by quarantine regulations? How can the material, documentary, legislative and spatial heritage of quarantine help us untangle narratives of global movement that were interrupted by incarceration?

Encompassing people and pathogens, vectors and vessels, flora and fauna, this conference seeks new interpretations of the place of quarantine. Moving in scale from intimate marks made by internees to multi-site or cross-regional comparisons, we seek to bring together maritime histories of quarantine with analyses of the inland islands of terrestrial quarantine. Above all, we hope to prompt surprising and productive conversations between archaeologists, historians, cultural and human geographers, and heritage scholars.

This international conference builds from a large multidisciplinary investigation of more than 1,000 sandstone inscriptions that cover the stunning Quarantine Station in Sydney, Australia (www.qstation.com.au). This unique site will form our venue for the conference, inspiring themes that are both local and global: mark-making, isolation, identity, and place.

Keynote speakers:
Nadav Davidovitch, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Gareth Hoskins, Aberystwyth University
Harold Mytum, University of Liverpool
Nayan Shah, University of Southern California
Alexandra Minna Stern, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

University of Sydney Organizing Committee: Alison Bashford, Annie Clarke, Ursula Frederick, Peter Hobbins.

The Quarantine Project: sydney.edu.au/arts/research/quarantine/