CHR Annual Theme 2025-26: Space, Territory, and Mobility 

Considerations of space, territory, and mobility--in their material, institutional, and sociocultural dimensions and in their discursive, representational, and conceptual dimensions--have long been central to humanistic inquiry. Concepts of space and place are embedded in cultural narratives and discourses that shape our understanding of who belongs and who is considered an outsider, our ideas of possession and dispossession, our conception of social and cultural heartlands and frontiers. The demarcation of territories, be it through physical borders, urban zoning, digital fences, or cultural boundaries, reflects and shapes political power, social inequality, and access to resources. And the dynamics of mobility—whether through migration, war, or conflict; the transformation of neighborhoods and communities; or the movement of capital, information, culture and goods across regions and in a globalized world—reveal both networks of connection and forms of exclusion and displacement.

We interpret the theme of “Space, Territory, and Mobility” broadly and aim to foster humanistic inquiry across multiple disciplines. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: discourses of nation and region; movements of refugees, exiles, and displaced populations; flows of people, capital, or culture between country and city, metropole and colony, or along other circuits or gradients; the history, ethics, and politics of borders; the locality and dissemination of languages, religions, and cultural practices; found, engineered, and imagined utopias; the negotiation of disability and mobility in the built environment; indigenous, decolonial, or anti-racist critiques of property, segregation, and exclusion; the role of routes, networks, and nodes in the diffusion and hybridization of cultural practices; environmental transformation, degradation, or repair; the spatial dynamics of detention and incarceration; digital landscapes as spaces of connection and control; passages between the worldly and otherworldly; the character and significance of borderlands, diasporas, and ecumenes; disciplinary practices that define themselves in terms of “areas” (geographical or spatial domains or foci) or of “movements” (of texts, discourses, artifacts, Ideologies, as well as of peoples, goods, technologies, institutions).  

Image: Facade along demarcation line (Nicosia, Cyprus)