CfP: Communities of Knowledge: Practices, Circulation and Transmission
11th Conference CITCEM – Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Porto, Portugal
CITCEM - Transdisciplinary Research Center for Culture, Space and Memory, invites researchers from across the world and from multiple disciplinary fields to reflect on the role of communities as spaces for the creation, transmission, and transformation of knowledge over time. This approach arises from ongoing discussions about the priorities of knowledge, its application, and its practices. Over time, who holds the power to determine the relevance and legitimacy of scientific production?
The 11th CITCEM Conference is embedded within this broad conceptual framework and welcomes theoretical reflections and case studies that adopt comparative, diachronic, and multidisciplinary perspectives. We encourage contributions that bring different territories, epistemic traditions, and temporalities into dialogue, that value non-hegemonic practices, and that challenge narratives centred on dominant knowledge models.
This conference seeks to explore how different communities – local, Indigenous, religious, professional, digital, academic, or transnational – construct and share memories and knowledge within diverse cultural, political, and historical contexts. It therefore asks: how do communities function as collective spaces of knowledge? What processes, practices, and forms of interaction enable this production of knowledge? To what extent does the analysis of the construction of formal and informal knowledge spaces contribute to understanding, creating, and communicating knowledge?
This plurality of approaches requires consideration of both institutional forms (schools, houses of knowledge, places of worship, libraries, archives, laboratories, workshops) and informal or experiential forms, including oral traditions, everyday practices, family networks, professional environments, ritual sociabilities, community participation, and experience‑based knowledge ecologies.
From a long‑term perspective, it is essential to understand how knowledge circulates through mobilities, encounters, trade routes, diasporas, colonial and post‑colonial processes, and migrations (forced or voluntary), as well as through technological or ritual mediations, generating hybridisations, tensions, or new forms of legitimation. Likewise, it is imperative to consider the power regimes that shape the visibility, transmission, and status of different types of knowledge.