A member of the L'Acadco dancers interprets the music at the opening ceremony of the global reggae conference at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, earlier this year. In July, the 2008 Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, championed by the international Association for Cultural Studies, will be held at the UWI. - Nathaniel Stewart/Freelance Photographer

More than 650 international participants from 68 countries will converge on the grounds of the University of the West Indies in July to participate in the first cultural and academic conference of its kind in the Caribbean. The 2008 Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference championed by the international Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) will touch down in Kingston from July 3-7.

This biennial conference has been traversing the globe ever since its first staging in Tampere, Finland, in 2000. The United Kingdom, the United States and Turkey have played hosts to previous conferences. This is the first time in the Caribbean.

"Being a site of conquest, dislocation, crossings, enslavement, rebellion, memory, survival, and immense creativity and heritage, we thought it would be a very relevant site for the seventh biennial staging of the conference," said local organising committee chairperson Professor Barry Chevannes.

Public participation

The local organising committee is being sponsored by the UWI Cultural Studies Initiative. It is planning a host of activities for public participation, including a cultural village that will display and interrogate the Carib-bean's unique cultural heritage through food, craft, music and dance. The cultural village will also be the site of much evening activities with themed nights focusing on Revival, Nyabinghi drumming and dancehall.

Keynote speakers for the con-ference include some of the Caribbean's best, such as Kamau Brathwaite, Rex Nettleford and Carolyn Cooper. It will also welcome other internationally recognised cultural scholars like Arturo Escobar of Manizales, Colombia and Jacqui Alexander, who is a professor of Women's Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.

The 2008 Crossroads conference will represent all the thematic manifestations of the overall conference theme, Of Sacred Crossroads, and all the general areas of interest that make up the cultural studies discipline.

Visit the website for more details: www.crossroads 2008.org .