CALL FOR PAPERS
‘Media and Place’
School of Humanities and
Cultural Studies
Faculty of Arts,
Environment and Technology
Leeds Metropolitan
University
To celebrate the launch
of the new ‘Media and Place’ Masters programme, we are pleased to announce our
conference on the 11-12th July 2014.
Confirmed Keynote
speakers:
Prof Shaun Moores
(University of Sunderland); Prof Kevin Hetherington (The Open University); Prof
Helen Wheatley (University of Warwick)
Media operate in settings
and environments: they exist in place. Some media spaces we occupy feel like
home – listening to our favourite radio stations while we drive to work – while
others enable virtual travel across vast physical spaces to different
geographical locations. Media can escort us in an instant from the glamour of
the global city to the minute, quotidian details of life lived at the local.
Television’s liveness can gather very different people in the same physical
space or draw together disparately located audiences around political events,
sports tournaments and ecological disasters. Film makes possible different
versions of the same city, multiplied as it filters differently through the
eyes of the director to the audience. Media can blur the boundaries between the
private and the professional, transform domestic boundaries into global
businesses, and offer individual opportunities for public confessionals. New
media connect us across continents with friends, loved ones and those we’ve
never met. Yet place is always more than a location on a map; it is lived and
experienced through repetition such that some places become laden with meanings
of belonging and affective attachment. In what ways does place matter to the
media? How far do we inhabit or live inside the media we use? Or rather, has
the electronic world created a culture of placelessness? This inter-disciplinary
conference welcomes researchers and practitioners from media and cultural
studies, urban history, post-colonial studies, gender studies, urban sociology,
cultural and phenomenological geography, politics, political economy,
philosophy, social and cultural theory, cultural policy, anthropology, town
planning, architecture, design, visual arts and ecology.
Conference themes
Themes and issues that
the conference seeks to cover include (but is not limited to):
1. The
cultural representations of land and urbanscapes across time and space;
2. Media and
other representations of place and in particular of the North of England;
3. Transitory
and marginalised spaces – suburbia, media as navigation, disadvantaged and
stigmatised neighbourhoods, urban fringes, places en route;
4. Urban arts
and media responses to the economic crisis post 2008, including – issues of
cultural activism, resistance and culture-led regeneration;
5. Theories
of rural and urban media mindscapes and imaginaries and of media, place and
affect;
6. Drama,
literature, cinema and television of the North: Kes, East is East, Last of the
Summer Wine, The Red Riding trilogy, Wuthering Heights, Haweswater, Fat Friends
…..
7. Post-colonial/global
city spaces, hybrid and intercultural uses of media in urban and rural places;
8. Guerilla
gardening, ecological DIY protest, pop-up urbanism, the emergence of new
informal cultural venues and other grassroots interventions in urban and rural
environments;
9. Digital
technologies and new uses of urban and rural space;
10.Disruption, artistic
intervention and subversive tactics (eg in post-communist
countries in Eastern and Central Europe);
11.Transport,
communication networks as media spaces;
12.Utopian/dystopian
places;
13.The reputation of
places in austerity times;
14.New media and spaces
of protest, conflict and subversion.
15.The places and
practices of sporting media (eg. Le Tour
de France, the Paralympics, the World Cup);
16.Bottom-up,
participatory urban and rural media and cultural
policies.
Publication
The conference organisers
are liaising with Palgrave MacMillan with a view to collecting selected
conference papers together in an edited collection for publication in 2015.
Submission of abstracts
The conference organisers
welcome proposals for single papers and panels of up to three papers. Please
send short proposals of no more than 300 words to mediaplaceconf2014@gmail.com,
by 1st February 2014 including a title, abstract, the theme your
paper speaks to and your affiliation details.
