In Paul Gilroy’s After Empire (2004), multiculturalism drifts, exists, resists and persists through boisterous and ongoing convivial cultures. This one-day conference will investigate the opportunities and limits of convivial spaces of the metropolis: places in the city where solidarities, kindness and intimacy have developed and been sustained between London’s plural constituents, but also where the edges of conviviality have been strained, policed or contested.

The conference hopes to consider how conviviality might offer ‘a more radical ideal of urban interaction’, that is ground level and extra-governmental, but can also be forced or imposed from above. The conference welcomes researchers adopting historical, geographic, sociological and cultural understandings of the city.

- How and where were such spaces constituted and by whom?
- Where are understandings of cosmopolitanism invested in the city’s spaces?
- What were the dynamics of the metropolitan space that generated such cultures?
- What are the limits of conviviality and what tensions does it produce, within or without the ‘multicultural project’?

Keynote Speaker: Dr Caroline Bressey

Interested researchers are asked to send an abstract of 250–400 words for a 20 minute paper and a brief bio to anna.m.maguire@kcl.ac.uk by midday, Monday 8 April 2019.

Funded by the History Department at King’s College London. Free to attend.

A number of travel bursaries are available to PhD and Early Career Academics: if you would like to apply, please indicate in your email.