OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

This is a call for papers for a panel we are organising at the Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference hosted by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and jointly organised with the British Academy, British Museum, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and SOAS University of London, 4-7 June 2020.

We are pleased to invite papers for the panel: ‘EMBODYING LIMINALITY IN TRANSITIONAL SPACES’ (Code B01), which is part of the ‘Borders and Places’ stream.

Convenors: Les Roberts (University of Liverpool) and Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores University)

Please provide a 250 word abstract proposal by 8th January 2020. All proposals must be made via the online form that can be found here: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020#8286

Papers should be around 15-20 minutes in length.

Further details about the conference can be found at: https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/anthropology-and-geography

Please see below for panel details:

PANEL B01: EMBODYING LIMINALITY IN TRANSITIONAL SPACES

Short abstract:

The aim of this panel is to explore new and emerging scholarship that seeks to draw together work that addresses the transformational potential of liminal spaces and the experiential, affective and embodied affordances that shape deeper understandings of the spatial phenomenology of liminality.

Long abstract:

The aim of this panel is to explore new and emerging scholarship that, while steered by foundational anthropological insights into liminality and liminal phenomena (Van Gennep 1960; Turner 1967; Shields 1991; Thomassen 2009, 2014), has sought to push these ideas into more rigorous dialogue with those that speak to questions of space and place. In this respect, building on recent work on liminal landscapes and spatial anthropology (Andrews and Roberts 2012, 2015; Roberts 2018), the panel invites contributors whose research engages with, and is informed by, the sociocultural practices and geographies that shape the experiential dynamics of liminal spaces. The psychosocial underpinnings that have remained a cornerstone of anthropological approaches to liminality (especially the work of Victor Turner) have found productive points of connection with strands of psychoanalytic theory and practice (Schwartz-Salant and Stein 1991), especially that developed by Donald Winnicott in his work on transitional objects and spaces, and the creative and performative possibilities of culture as ‘play’ (Winnicott 1971; Kuhn 2013). This, in turn, recalls Huizinga’s (1980 [1938]) writings on Homo Ludens which speak to the liberatory and creative potential that underwrites what he refers to as the ‘play element of culture’. Guided by these and related cross-currents of ideas on liminality as passage through ‘transitional spaces’, the panel seeks to draw together work that addresses the transformational potential of liminal spaces and the experiential, affective and embodied affordances that shape deeper understandings of the spatial phenomenology of liminality.

The Eighth International Tourism and Media (ITAM) Conference

5-7th July, 2018 Liverpool, UK

The Production of Location

The eighth ITAM conference aim is to continue the network’s exploration of new ideas and debates sprung from the intersection between tourism industries and practices and those that broadly relate to the fields of media and communication. In this vein, the conference will aim to provide a forum where, taking their lead from Rodanthi Tzanelli’s concept of ‘global sign industries’ (2007), interdisciplinary research conversations gather pace around what are increasingly convergent fields of study and practice. While trends in scholarship on tourism and media are often reflective of discreet disciplinary dispositions, particularly those linked to perspectives in marketing and business, the necessarily open and ‘undisciplined’ terrain that defines the critical landscapes of media and tourism today demands a similarly open and undisciplined approach to keep pace with what is an ever-shifting and multi-stranded field of study.

The overarching theme of this conference is The Production of Location and we invite contributions that critically address questions of cultural brokerage in media tourism whilst continuing to welcome submissions from the inter- and cross-disciplinary traffic that informs the research on media and tourism and addresses a range of topics pertinent to both areas.

Dates: 5-7th July 2018

Location: School of the Arts, University of Liverpool, UK.

Keynote: Dr Rodanthi Tzanelli, Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology, University of Leeds (http://www.sociology.leeds.ac.uk/people/staff/tzanelli)

Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted by 30th March 2018 to: ITAM2018@liverpool.ac.uk

For enquiries please contact:

Dr Maria Månsson University of Lund, Sweden : maria.mansson@isk.lu.se

Dr Hazel Andrews, Liverpool John Moores University, UK : h.j.andrews@ljmu.ac.uk

Dr Les Roberts, University of Liverpool, UK : les.roberts@liverpool.ac.uk

The conference fee is £175 (conference meal and excursion optional extras TBC)

Further information will be posted on the conference website in due course: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/communication-and-media/itam2018

RC21 Leeds :
September 11-13, 2017 Rethinking Urban Global Justice: An international academic
conference for critical urban studies

More Than Pedestrian: Psychogeography, Creative Walking and Spatial Justice

It is sixty years since Debord wrote The Theory of The Dérive, and psychogeography has evolved in many different artistic, activist and academic directions, often at an apparent loss of its political intentions. However many recent practitioners have been using walking as way to interrogate, destabilise and affectively remap space. Many now recognise that there is an emerging “new psychogeography” identified by Richardson (2015) as being, amongst other things, heterogeneous, critical, strategic, and somatic. This richness and diversity is embodied in members of the Walking Artists Network. They exhibit a wealth of contemporary creative walking, much of which is at least in part inspired by psychogeography. This suggests the dérive has the potential to transform the everyday, to illuminate and challenge narratives of privatisation, commodification and securitisation of space, and navigate increasingly blurred boundaries between public/private. This session aims to explore what the theory and practice of psychogeography and creative walking can offer Urban Studies.

This call is for panellists offering papers on the following areas of walking practice and psychogeography:

• How psychogeography and creative walking practices can engage with and interrogate the urban environment

• New interpretations of Situtationist ideas

• Innovations, issues and debates around creative walking methodologies

• Issues of urban spatial injustice highlighted via imaginary, temporary and mobile spaces

• Activist, community and radical mapping practices

The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion and questions from the audience.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject we are very open to presenters who have audio visual material or unconventional presentation methods.

Please send abstracts (approximately 300-500 words) to both the session convenor Morag Rose, The University of Sheffield mltrose1@sheffield.ac.uk and the conference organisers rc21@Leeds.ac.uk Deadline 10th March 2017

More about the conference here: https://rc21leeds2017.wordpress.com/

Voicing Experience:

The 4th British Conference of Autoethnography

15-16 June, 2017, University of Sussex, Brighton

This interdisciplinary conference aims to provide an open,
creative space in which to explore the power of autoethnographic work as
expressed through its heterogeneous practices, productions and performances.
What happens when we begin to take our experiences of the worlds we inhabit
seriously and to give reflexive and diffractive voice, through manifold
creative means, to that experience? What resonances do we find with other
narratives and voices articulating experiences from other spheres? How does
voicing experience speak to and challenge the larger structures within which we
live? And how do these different spheres shape, in turn, the quality and style
of voices being expressed – their tone, mode of expression, fluency and
persuasiveness?

The conference seeks to explore the power of
autoethnographic work, as expressed, for instance, in dynamics of resistance,
critique, healing or assistance.

We invite proposals for papers, presentations, performances
and other creative works.

Please submit proposals with abstract (250 words) and, if
relevant, session plan (max 250 words) to voicingexperience2017@sussex.ac.uk<mailto:voicingexperience2017@sussex.ac.uk>
by 10th February 2017.

The presentations will be arranged in the following ways:

· 90-minute
3-person presentation sessions.

· 90-minute
single presentation sessions.

Please indicate which presentation format you would prefer.

Conference fee for this 2-day event (excluding
accommodation): £75

We have a limited number of reduced-rate tickets (£45) for
students and unemployed.

For general enquiries, please write to: voicingexperience2017@sussex.ac.uk<mailto:voicingexperience2017@sussex.ac.uk>

Please see the website for full details and registration: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sociology/outreach/sociology-conferences/voicingexperience

Organising Committee: Dr Jamie Barnes (Sociology, Sussex),
Dr Michael Hayler (Education, Brighton), Dr Ross Wignall (Anthropology,
Sussex).

This Conference is initiated by Brighton Autoethnography
Group with sponsorship & support from the Departments of Anthropology and
Sociology, University of Sussex.

Archiving the City/ City as Archive

Thursday 16 March 2017, 9.00am to 6.00pm

A symposium organised by the Archiving the City research strand.

We are inviting abstract submissions for a one-day symposium entitled Archiving the City/ City as Archive. This event, hosted by the Centre for Modern Studies, considers the cultural forms through which the modern city is archived. It examines the different ways—via institutions, public art, collective practice, and more—in which urban history and memory are organised and presented in contemporary culture. It also engages with how the spaces and architecture of the city may themselves present an archive, offering up reminders of social and cultural processes, imaginaries, struggles and events.

The symposium critically engages with Henri Lefebvre’s (2014) argument that the reign of the city is ending; that the city now only exists as an image and an idea. In addition, the gentrification and museification of the historic urban core reveals, at least in part, the deep sense of loss through which that the modern metropolis is increasingly remembered. This connects more broadly with Derrida’s (1996) notion of ‘archive fever’, which, he understands, is part of a compulsive, repetitive culture; a ‘homesickness’ born of a ‘nostalgic desire to return to the origin’ (ibid: 167). As such, the symposium is interested in perspectives that make links between contemporary archiving processes (both formal and informal), city museums, visual culture, heritage urbanism, ‘authenticity’ and the cultural regeneration of historic urban spaces. Particularly welcome are proposals that critically examine the ways in which the city is archived to create the impression of a post-conflictual present or in ways that make the city a more exclusive or restricted place. In addition, we welcome abstracts that explore how archiving the city can, in ways reminiscent of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, reveal the immediacy and fragmentary nature of metropolitan experience. The symposium will take an open-minded and critical approach to understanding how, why and where the modern city is archived and what such processes reveal about history, memory, social conflict and urban imaginaries.

Abstracts of no longer than 250 words to be sent to gareth.millington@york.ac.uk by 5pm on Friday January 6th. We especially welcome abstracts from postgraduate and doctoral students.

Confirmed external speakers include Rebecca Madgin (University of Glasgow) and Graeme Gilloch (University of Lancaster).

Registration for University of York staff and students is free. Please book your place here: http://store.york.ac.uk/product-catalogue/centre-for-modern-studies/conferences

References

Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: Chicago University Press
Lefebvre, H. (2014) ‘Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 199-202

Location: The Treehouse, Berrick Saul Building

Email: gareth.millington@york.ac.uk

Media’s Mapping Impulse

Cartography
is one of the oldest forms of media. In both cartography and media,
meaning, ideology, and power are habitually arbitrated across and
through space and time. While critical cartographers
have shed light on mapping’s innate tendency toward the objectification
of spatial relations, a (masculine) gaze that it cannot disown, these
same power relations are equally embedded in media’s voyeuristic and
controlling tendencies. Media, moreover, in
all its diverse forms, has an underlying mapping impulse – a proclivity
to comprehend itself and be rendered comprehensible through metaphors
of topologies, networks, and flows that lead to the constant evacuation
of spaces in order to produce places of communication.
This mapping impulse is hardly new, but rather has been part of media
all along. Visual media, for instance, developed out of a mapping
impulse during the Renaissance, which led to the scopic regimes of
projectionism and perspectivalism and their related
technologies. Both media and cartography are never static, but rather
are ongoing scopic and discursive regimes that continually make and
remake the terms in which we understand and interact with our world.

And yet,
the mapping impulse of media is both overt and subtle. Think, for
instance, of the subtle duplicity of Hollywood’s runaway productions,
which creatively map Toronto as the “other” New
York, Romania as North Carolina, or South Africa as California.
Developments in mobile computing have not only increased the pace, flow,
and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus
the taken-for-grantedness, of mapping. More and
more, owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media
requires a geographical situatedness in which and for which media can
take place. Here, locative media relies on programming languages and
APIs to construct geo-fencing, geo-tagging,
and geo-coding and to produce applications and services that localize
and individualize information to one’s liminal, transitory, and fleeting
lived space. Consider, for example, the ways in which (geo)web 2.0
unites one’s virtual and physical presence (if
such a distinction can be made) via services such as FourSquare or
Facebook check-ins that announce one’s whereabouts to friends and
acquaintances.

With this
collection of papers we seek to illuminate media’s mapping impulse by
exploring the relationship between cartography, geospatial technologies,
and locative media on the one hand, and new
and traditional media forms such as social media, mobile apps,
television, film, and music, on the other.
Media’s Mapping Impulse will be an international and
interdisciplinary gathering of essays to be printed in the acclaimed
Media Geography at Mainz (MGM) book series (www.geo.uni-mainz.de/mgm).
Possible themes
and areas of focus for this book include, but are not limited to:
montage and bricolage; the cartographic paradox and cartographic
anxiety; the spatial turn in media studies; GIS as media and the use of
GIS to understand media; sensorial cartographies, sound
and musical maps; cinematic cartographies; locative media, mobile apps,
and the everyday; sharing economies (AirBnB, Couch Surfing, Uber) and
the map; architectonics, spatial mobilities, haptical and emotional
cartographies; urban planning, media and the revisualization
of place.

Those
interested in participating should send an extended abstract (750-1,000
words), along with a curriculum vitae and contact information, to Laura
Sharp (laurasharp@email.arizona.edu)
with the subject line “Media’s Mapping Impulse.” We ask that all proposals be submitted on or before
September 15th, 2015. Responses to these proposals will be returned by
November 1st, 2015. If selected, full papers will be expected on or before
March 31, 2015. A blind review will be conducted on all papers. Final papers will be due no later than
June 1, 2016. All authors selected for the final collection will
be welcome to attend the “Media’s Mapping Impulse” symposium to be held
at the
Institute of Geography at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz in June 2016.

ECREA TWG MEDIA & THE CITY 2015 CONFERENCE

Urban Media Studies: Concerns, intersections and challenges
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, 24–25 September 2015

Confirmed keynote speaker: Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory, Dept. of
Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University. Other keynote
speakers to be announced soon.

Call for papers and panels

Media related practices are grounded in the city – where the majority of human
population today lives – and media as both technologies and representations
pervade nearly all aspects of urban living, cutting through diverse forms of
public appearance, community, control, resistance and habitation.

As a result, none of the established perspectives in media studies, whether
that of democracy and participation, production and technology, representation
and use, or belonging and identity, can claim to have an exhaustive
understanding of their problematics without appreciating the urban context. In
the same way, no urban process can be fruitfully tackled without taking into
account the involvement of media and media related practices.

Yet, despite being closely – though unevenly – entwined, from small towns to
megalopolises, the two complexes, media and the city, have remained disjointed
in the scholarly analyses. In fact, it can be argued that for media scholars in
particular, the city has remained a terra incognita.

Wishing to revive the initial enthusiasm in media studies, which started as an
interdisciplinary endeavour, Urban Media Studies conference aspires to provide
a dialogic space for disciplines interested in mediated urbanism. We also hope
to stimulate critical reflections on the challenges of collaborating across
disciplinary boundaries. Thus, though speaking from the position of media
studies, we invite submissions from scholars who work in all relevant fields that
interface with the key issue of media and the city. These include, but are not
limited to, such fields as urban geography, urban sociology, architecture,
anthropology, science and technology studies, visual and sound/auditory culture
studies, sociology of the senses, and other related subfields.

We specifically welcome submissions which deal with the following themes and
approach them with an interdisciplinary curiosity – as potential intersections
between two or more fields of research:

Historical connections between urban studies and media studies
Urban spaces and media practices
Urban sociality and media
Mediation of urban daily life
Media, architecture and urban design
‘Media cities’ as production clusters and complexes
Performing and audiencing (in) the mediated city
Media, urban power, resistance and conflict
Media, gender and the city
Media, ethnicity and the city
Urban spaces of media consumption
Urban law in the digitally sustained cities
Mediated urban sensescapes
Urban, outdoor and ambient advertising
Fashion as urban communication
Urban gaming
Journalism and the city
The city as a mediated ecosystem
Urban mediation and spatial negotiations
Methodologies of urban media studies
Teaching about media and the city

We welcome both individual and multi-authored abstracts, and full panel
proposals (with four presentations; 15–20 minutes per presentation). In the
case of panel proposals, the candidate chair should provide a title and a short
general description of the proposed panel, together with the abstracts of all
presenters.

In addition to conventional academic presentations of original theoretical,
methodological and/or empirical research of any of the above or other related
themes, we encourage practice-based presentations, like urban films and
documentaries, sonic projects and other exploratory artwork that probe issues
of media and the city.

Abstract proposals (300 words) for presentations and panels, together with
short bios, should be submitted tomediacity.twg@gmail.com
by May 1st, 2015. Authors will be informed of acceptance by June 1st, 2015.

The conference will also feature a special dialogic plenary where participants
from different disciplines will be invited to share views on their work in the
context of media and the city.

As part of our commitment to stimulate interaction between scholars from
different disciplines, we shall also be organising a guided urban exploration
of Zagreb’s industrial, modernist/utopian architectural heritage, and
post-industrial urban developments.

A selection of papers will be published in an edited book and/or in a journal
special issue.

Conference fee is 50 Euros for ECREA members, 70 Euros for non-members. The fee
will cover conference materials, and coffee and lunch both days.

Any queries should be sent to conference organizers Seija Ridell (University of
Tampere, Finland), Simone Tosoni (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and
Zlatan Krajina (University of Zagreb, Croatia). Please use the conference
e-mail address:mediacity.twg@gmail.com.

OBS. For the conference updates, please follow the Media& the City
websites onhttp://twg.ecrea.eu/MC/ andhttps://www.facebook.com/mediaandthecity

Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics
15 – 19 June 2015

TALLINN & TARTU, ESTONIA

The Nordic Geographers Meeting is a biennial meeting of originally Nordic geographers that has grown into a considerable international event and for its 6th meeting expand its geography to include Estonia. Previous meetings were held in Lund, Sweden (2005); Bergen, Norway (2007); Turku, Finland (2009); Roskilde, Denmark (2011), and Reykjavík, Iceland (2013).The meeting will thus be held in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia on
 15 – 19 June 2015. It is jointly organised by the Estonian Geographical Society, Tallinn Univeristy, University of Tartu, and Estonian University of Life Sciences.

Estonian Geographical Society in cooperation with Estonian universities invites session proposals for the 6th Nordic Geographers Meeting in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia on 
15 – 19 June 2015 on the theme “Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics“. Both human and physical geographers are encouraged to participate under this broad heading but the organisers aim at highlighting the connections between nature (climate) and imagination, culture contacts between East and West (across and beyond the Baltic to the Far East, the Americas and Oceania) including geographical explorations and the issues of interpretation and politics (including being lost or found in translation).

Conference information here.

http://www.tlu.ee/en/ngm2015

Spaces and Mobilities in
Mediatized Worlds

An Interdisciplinary
International Conference

Karlstad, SWEDEN, 5-8 May 2015

GeoMedia 2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized academic field. GeoMedia 2015 welcomes scholars of all disciplines who address questions pertaining to the space-mobility-media-communication nexus and want to take part in current epistemological discussions regarding communication geography and its future(s).

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Mustafa Dikec – Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Mimi Sheller – Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

John Tomlinson – Nottingham Trent University, UK

Confirmed plenary panel:

Paul C. Adams (chair) – University of Texas at
Austin, USA

Julie Cupples – University of Edinburgh, UK

Dana Diminescu – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
Paris, France

Hille Koskela – University of Turku, Finland

Confirmed films & directors:

“The Forgotten Space” – Noël Burch (director)

“Cosmopolitanism” – Erik Gandini (director)

Abstract submissions:

GeoMedia 2015 welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as thematic panels in English through www.geomedia.se

Individual paper proposals: The author submits an abstract of 200-250 words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 5 papers according to thematic area.

Thematic panel proposals: The chair of the panel submits a proposal consisting of 4-5 individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) along with a general panel presentation of 200-250 words.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:–

Communication geographies

– Mobilities and locative media

– Power geometries of/in motion

– “Newsworthy” spaces

– Mobilities, flows and new media

– Material geographies of media

– Policy mobilities and power

– Media ecologies

– Lifestyle and tourism mobilities

– Pervasive media

– Cinematic geographies

– Mobility and governance

– New media and the productions of place/space

– Urban and rural media spaces

– Geographies of media and culture industries

– Art and event spaces

We plan to put together an anthology (not a proceedings) of selected papers and publish it with an established international scholarly press. Information will be provided to conference participants.

Conference Timeline

August 16: Submission system opens

October 10 2014: Deadline for thematic panel proposals

December 1 2014: Deadline for individual paper proposals

December 15: Registration opens

January 16 2015: Notes of acceptance

March 31 2015: Last day of registration

Conference website:

Information about the registration, conference program, venue, social events and practical arrangements, will be posted continuously at the conference website: www.geomedia.se

Contact: you can reach us at info@geomedia.se

Organizers and venue:

GeoMedia 2015 is hosted by the Department of Geography, Media and
Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden.

Mekonnen
Tesfahuney, Conference General

Linda
Ryan Bengtsson, GeoMedia Co-ordinator

André Jansson,
Director of GeoMedia

CONFERENCE STATEMENT

GeoMedia
2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized academic field.

As stated by a number of scholars during the last decade, there are obvious reasons as to why such a field has emerged. Notably, recent developments in terms of expanding (trans)media technologies/networks together with intensified forms of mobility (migration, tourism, commuting, etc.) have had ambiguous spatial consequences: they alter the ways in which spaces and places are produced; they create new hybrid and interstitial spaces, and they affect how people establish senses of belonging and understandings of the world. Spatial practices and experiences, whether we look at the mundane level of everyday life or institutionalized processes such as regional governance or cultural production, are thus increasingly mediatized, i.e., saturated by or dependent on various media technologies and symbolic flows. Traditional mass media, and their modes of interpreting and encoding the world, are being supplemented by various forms of privatized media that sometimes have direct geographical impacts on social life; materially (e.g., portable digital devices) and representationally (e.g., geo-tagging).

At the same time, the conditions for communication in general and media practices in particular become more complex in times of intensified mobility and porous (territorial) boundaries: the places and spaces of symbolic circulation are no longer as clear-cut as they used to be, and questions of policies and legislations pertaining to media infrastructures and content circulation become more open-ended. Pre-established centres of mediated and symbolic power are contested.

These on-going transformations account for converging research agendas among geographers and media/film scholars. Communication geography is also an epistemological project that must be open to neighbouring fields such as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and political science. The mediatized relations between spatial processes and communication can be related to overarching transformations of modern, capitalist societies, and to the enduring significance of economic, cultural and social power structures. Whereas the means and expressions of spatial production (including phenomena ranging from the everyday textures of the domestic sphere to ideologies of urban transformation and place branding) may alter in tandem with media developments, these are still shaped by gender, ethnicity and class relations. Whereas concepts such as communication, place and distance are in need of problematization, as suggested by various epistemological “turns” (e.g. the “spatial turn”, the “mobility turn” and the “cultural turn”), such discussions have to be framed by structural understandings of society as well as micro-oriented accounts of human nature and agency.

Reblogged from Progressive Geographies

What is Space: a Post-Disciplinary
Workshop on the Return of an Old Debate

Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.

17 June 2014. Poster here.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces
frightens me (Pascal, Thoughts, 1964)

Space is the everywhere of modern thought. It is
the flesh that flatters the bones of theory. It is an all-purpose nostrum to be
applied whenever things look sticky. (Crang and Thrift, Thinking Space, 2000)

The
question of space has in both the humanities and the social sciences recently
regained prominence on academic agendas. The so-called ‘spatial turn’,
initially set in motion by geographers, has allowed historians, philosophers,
sociologists, anthropologists, artists and others to return to the long
abandoned, albeit fundamental, question of what space is. This reengagement has
resulted in a gradual, ongoing questioning and re-opening of the great debates
that earlier characterised the European Renaissance. Contemporary discussions
and writings about space have led to a multiplication of literal and
metaphorical spatial references ranging from ‘location’, ‘terrain’, ‘site’,
‘region’ among countless others. This intellectual enrichment means however
also that the question of space has become an increasingly messy, ambiguous and
sometimes even incongruous affair.

This workshop invites junior
and senior academics from across the University to explain and demonstrate how
they conceptualise space in their work. We believe that the problem of space is
too important to be left to one discipline. The objective of this one-day
workshop is therefore to deterritorialise and transcend the longstanding
disciplinary academic divisions and to reengage academics from all departments
in an attempt to build bridges over the vast rivers that have come to divide
us. The goal is not so much to arrive at a common consensus, nor to find a
universally acceptable solution to the fundamental problem that space poses to
us, but to openly start questioning and speculating again about the meaning we
give to the concept.

We invite abstracts of no more
than 300 words for papers of approximately 20 minutes in length, accompanied by
a short biographical note. Please email all abstracts and inquiries to the
convenor, Dr Marijn Nieuwehuis. The deadline for the receipt of all abstracts is
the 6th of May 2014. We can discuss the possibilities of combining
the workshop papers into an edited volume.

This workshop is funded by the Institute of
Advanced Study, University of Warwick.

North! Mapping Cinematic Norths

Friday May 2nd 10-6, Showroom Cinema Sheffield

This event, hosted by the Sheffield Centre for Research in Film, invites exploration of the representation, construction and function of North in film.

The North retains a singularity and certitude in its magnetic signaling of trajectory, route, and direction (home) yet, as Peter Davidson’ reminds us in The Idea of North (2005), ‘Everyone has a different north, their own private map of the emotional – indeed the moral – geography of north and south.’

North
remains an important relational positioning, a loaded projection, an
emphatic somewhere and a powerful elsewhere. Such relational sites are
imbued with cultural, economic and political geographies, epitomized by the defiant signage of Sheffield’s Designers Republic which proclaims their place as ‘North of Nowhere’ TM.

Norths
evoke topographical and meteorological challenge, landscapes of harsh
remoteness, austere beauty and meditative emptiness. Constructions of
space and place characterized by both passionate solidarities and
haunting solitudes, sparkling utopias and dark nostalgias, industrial
heartland, badland, borderland, no man’s land.

The
plotting of these myriad Norths, which bewitch compasses and confound
maps in their elusive, shifting and relational natures can be explored
and traced in moving images.

Suggested areas for discussion include:

– the construction of different relational Norths
– the role of north-ness in constructions of star identity (auteurs and actors)
– Romantic ethnographies and Northern-ness
– landscapes and soundscapes of the North
– national and transnational constructions of Norths
– genre and North
– the role of national / regional policies for funding film production

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers. Please send proposals (200 words) to – researchinfilm@sheffield.ac.uk. Deadline: Friday 21st March

http://researchinfilm.group.shef.ac.uk/

International Colloquium

Spaces of Memory &
Performance: Trauma, Affect, Displacement

University of East London, Centre
of Performing Arts Development (CPAD)

Date: 20-21 June 2014

Venue: University of East
London, University Square.

Confirmed
speakers: Claudia Fontes (visual artist), Lola Arias (theatre
director), Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths), Anne Huffschmidt (Freie Universitat
Berlin), Ananda Breed (UEL), Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow), Valentina
Salvi (UNTREF), Patricia Violi (University of Bologna), Eve Katsouraki (UEL).

‘Places
are lost – destroyed, vacated, barred – but then there is some new place, and
it is not the first, never can be the first.’ – Judith Butler

The aftermath of episodes of
trauma and loss have traditionally given way to urban rituals and encounters
with sites of public grieving. Even so, the emergence of disparate sites of
trauma has not been enough addressed from a performative perspective. The very
existence of the so-called ‘spaces of memory’ requests the reconfiguration of
modes of engagement with the public space in the face of trauma and its
performance. With this in mind, this two-day symposiumwill explore
unconventional forms of intervention in performance and visual arts in a wide
spectrum of geographical scenarios. The question that underlines the event is
how to propitiate public pathways to engage with loss and trauma among expanded
publics. While contesting processes of normalization of memory, the
symposium seeks to discover embodied, ephemeral and unmarked spaces as sites of
enchantment and public gathering. It also explores transitional and diasporic
interventions that might envisage news forms of being together. The
symposium is also an invitation to imagine the futurity of sites of memory and
explore fictions that may transform the politics of spectatorship in the
present.

Some of the key themes to be
explored include:

– What is a ‘space of memory’?

– How innovative practices of intervention may awake a shared sense
of ownership towards disparate traumatic pasts?

– How to investigate the affectivity of space in
relation to memory and spectatorship?

– How sites of trauma become marked, unmarked, and
displaced?

– Is it possible to encourage ways of ‘performing
life’ within landscapes marked by loss?

– How disparate forms of theatre, performance and
visual arts may contribute to ‘work through’ collective processes of suffering?

– Might bodies emerge as sites of public grieving?

– Might different forms of fiction help us to
re-inhabit trauma in the present?

By rethinking the
performativity of space and trauma, the symposium aims to generate a new and
interdisciplinary dialogue among social sciences, visual arts, literature,
theatre and performance.

We
invite proposals (300 words) for 20 minutes papers & practical
presentations, showings or shorter 10minprovocations/interventions from artists
and curators, practitioners and scholars working at the crossroads of memory
studies, performance, cultural studies, affect and trauma theory. Some
thematic explorations may include:

– Urban space, memorialisation and landscapes

– The affectivity of the space and unconventional
ways of relating to trauma

– Topographies and architectures of affect

– Post-traumatic spaces & performatives

– Sounds of trauma & haunted spaces

– Monuments, living memorials & bones

– Curation, empathy & care

– Ruins, future & potentiality

– Practises of reoccupation and ‘rehabilitation’ of
space

– Abject spaces & body as site of trauma

– New museums, dark tourism

– The place of the perpetrators

– Transmission of trauma, vicarious and prosthetic
memories

– Politics of reparation & spectatorship

Please send
proposals to Cecilia Sosa c.sosa@uel.ac.uk and
Eve Katsouraki e.katsouraki@uel.ac.uk by
March 31st2014.

This research event has the support of the British Academy International Partnership and
Mobility (IPM) SchemeProgramme ‘Commemoration,
New Audiences and Spaces of Memory in Latin America’s Southern Cone:
Trans-cultural Dialogues in the Wake of Loss’. (PI: Dr. Cecilia Sosa,
Postdoctoral researcher, School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of
East London).

CALL FOR PAPERS: MOVING MOUNTAINS – STUDIES IN PLACE,
SOCIETY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATION

February 5, 2014

University of Edinburgh

History of Art and ESALA

18-20 June 2014

Visit the Moving Mountains website here

Mountains have been considered embodiments of higher
spiritual goals and peak experiences since ancient times. By viewing mountains,
climbing and experiencing changing atmospheres, people have undergone physical
and spiritual quests, the character of which varies depending on the motivation
and identity of the participant(s). The consistent presence of mountains in
legends, myths, literature, artistic and architectural creations suggests their
cultural, religious and social significance. Additionally, mountains and their
surrounding landscape have been the focus of cartographic and scientific work,
mountaineering expeditions and other kinds of explorations.

In order to more fully understand the role of mountains in culture
and society, the History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh and
the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture are hosting an
inter-disciplinary conference and an exhibition of practice-based material. We
invite abstracts of no more than 300 words addressing questions and proposing
works relevant to the role of mountains in the humanities, arts and design. As
this is intended to be a highly interdisciplinary conference, we welcome
submissions from a wide range of subject areas, which include art history,
architecture, anthropology, cultural studies, film studies geography,
literature, theology and philosophy, among others.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

– The integration of mountains into architectural design and
artistic creations

– City and mountains

– Mountain landscapes, caves and paths

– The impact of mountains on religious practices

– Memory and mountains

– Studies of Mountain communities

– Cultural representations of mountains (cartography, iconography,
photography)

– ‘Peak’ Experiences and Mountain Views

– Atmosphere and the aura of mountains

– Religious experiences and mountains

Confirmed keynote speakers include: Professor Veronica della
Dora of the University of London, Professor Tim Ingold of the University of
Aberdeen and Eamonn O’Carragain of the University College Cork.

Please email abstracts to movingmountainsconference@gmail.com
by 28 February 2014. Abstracts will be reviewed by an academic committee and we
hope to publish selected papers from this conference.

Please email any further inquiries to
movingmountainsconference@gmail.com, or you can contact the conference organisers,
Emily Goetsch and Christos Kakalis directly at ebgoetsch@gmail.com and
xpkakalis@hotmail.com.

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.

Literary cartographies: the co-production of page and place.
Sponsored by Social and Cultural Geography Research Group RGS-IBG AC2014

This session invites papers that investigate the ways in which geographies of
fiction co-produce the real and imagined places around us. As Piatti et al
observe, geography is essential to fiction, it is “impossible to even think of
literature without any spatial context” (2008:4); however, the co-productive
relationship between real places and literary stories is complex. In some
cases, fiction intersects directly with real world cartographies. Narratives
can be based in specific countries, regions, and towns, so much so that we can
visit them in person and follow our characters’ footsteps with our own. This
direct coincidence of fictional and geographical space can be seen in examples
such as Hardy’s Wessex, Kerouac’s California, or Auster’s New York. In other
fictions, real geographies are moulded, with distances reduced, streets folded
and landmarks crumpled together. In this way, (brave) new worlds are invented
in the author’s and readers’ imagination. In the same way as some authors
invent ‘counterfactual histories’ (see Piatti and Hurni, 2009), these
re-workings may be conceived of as ‘counterfactual geographies’. However, as
this session explores, any claim to a clear and reliable reality is often
difficult to maintain in the realm of literature and geography. Thus, in the
words of Piatti and Hurni, stories can be rooted directly in the “physically
comprehensible world”, or exist in their own “rich geographical layer” above
it. These complex and fascinating relations combine to produce the “geography
of fiction” (Piatti & Hurni, 2011:218).

This session invites papers which explore the ways through which page and place
are co-produced in reading and writing practice. Secondly, it offers a
supplementary walking tour, based around a relevant piece of literature, which
offer a ‘novel’ means through which to experience the co-production of page and
place.

Session Convenors:
Dr Jon Anderson, School of Planning & Geography, Cardiff University. Email:
andersonj@cf.ac.uk
Dr Angharad Saunders, University of South Wales. Email: angharad.saunders@southwales.ac.uk

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Mapping Culture: Communities, Sites and Stories

May 28-30, 2014

Coimbra, Portugal

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Centre for Social Studies (Centro de Estudos Sociais – CES), a State Associate Laboratory at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, is calling for the submission of papers and panel/workshop proposals from academics, researchers, public administrators, architects, planners and artists for an international conference and symposium. The CES is committed to questions of public interest, including those involving relationships between scientific knowledge and citizens’ participation.

Cultural Mapping – A general definition:
Cultural mapping involves a community identifying and documenting local cultural resources. Through this research cultural elements are recorded – the tangibles like galleries, craft industries, distinctive landmarks, local events and industries, as well as the intangibles like memories, personal histories, attitudes and values. After researching the elements that make a community unique, cultural mapping involves initiating a range of community activities or projects, to record, conserve and use these elements. …The most fundamental goal of cultural mapping is to help communities recognize, celebrate, and support cultural diversity for economic, social and regional development. — Clark, Sutherland and Young

An emerging interdisciplinary field
Cultural mapping reflects the spatial turn taken in many related areas of research, including cultural and artistic studies, architecture and urban design, geography, sociology, cultural policy and planning. Traditional approaches to cultural mapping emphasize the centrality of community engagement, and the process of mapping often reveals many unexpected resources and builds new cross-community connections.

Internationally, cultural mapping has come to be closely associated with professional cultural planning practices, but its recent adoption within a variety of disciplinary areas means that ‘traditional’ approaches are being re-thought and expanded, with cultural mapping practices adopting new methodologies, perspectives and objectives as they evolve.

This event is intended to explore both conventional and alternative approaches to mapping cultures and communities in an international context. Presenters will discuss and illustrate innovative ways to encourage artistic intervention and public participation in cultural mapping. They will also address the challenges posed by such artistic practices and community involvement in various phases of the research process, from gathering and interpreting data to modes of presenting ‘findings’ to interest groups from different sectors – the local public as well as specialists in the arts, research, public administration and planning.

Two key dimensions of current research with implications for artistic, architectural and planning practices are:
(a) the participatory and community engagement aspect, especially in the context of accessible mobile digital technologies
(b) mapping the intangibilities of a place (e.g., stories, histories, etc.) that provide a “sense of place” and identity to specific locales, and the ways in which those meanings and values may be grounded in embodied experiences.

These two aspects will be highlighted in the conference presentations and symposium workshops, bridging interests of both researchers and practitioners.

EVENT COMPONENTS
 Keynote lectures
 Plenary panel sessions with discussions among researchers, artists/creators, and local planners/municipal representatives
 Interactive workshop sessions (Symposium)
 Associated artistic presentations to complement event themes

KEY THEMES
 Cultural mapping as an agent of community engagement
 Cultural mapping as a tool of local policy development
 Cultural mapping processes and methodologies
 Multimedia mapping tools – recording interpretations and cultural uses of public space
 Artistic approaches to cultural mapping
 The artist-researcher in interdisciplinary inquiry
 Understanding architecture and urban space through mapping

Sub-Themes
Particular panel sessions can be organized for sub-themes such as:
 ‘Making visible’ eco-cultural knowledge and practices through mapping
 Political underpinnings of cultural mapping – Lessons and corrections
 Mapping as activist art

Symposium – Linking research and practice
Collaborative research with communities can help us better understand its role in their cultural and social development. But how to create or recreate such an experience? The Symposium elements will address how multidisciplinary research perspectives can be applied to local development practice. Workshops will be used to explore the possible contributions of cultural mapping approaches to different communities at a local level, and the role for academia.

 What type of ‘cultural map’ is required, and what methodological tools have proven to be valuable?
 How can academic knowledge be effectively applied to solving issues at the community level?
 How much of this information is more than what we see, that is, ‘cultural mapping’ for the intangible or unseen?

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
We invite proposals for individual paper/project presentations, thematic panel sessions and workshops. The primary language of the event will be English, but proposals for presentations in Portuguese are also welcome. (We will try to arrange for ‘informal’ translation support for Portuguese-language sessions, as possible.)

SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL (online at the CES website: www.ces.uc.pt)
Required information:
 Name of primary author
 Email of primary author
 Names of other authors (if applicable)
 Position/title of primary author
 Organization/institution
 Department
 City
 Country
 Is this presentation part of a proposed panel? Y/N
 If yes, title of panel
 Title of presentation
 Abstract (250 words)
 Key theme(s) of presentation (from the list of themes above)
 Brief bio of presenter(s), including position/role of each (e.g., researcher, professor, architect, doctoral student, artist, town planner, etc.) (max. 250 words)

Panel Proposals
If you are proposing a panel, please submit the proposed paper of each panel participant separately, using the submission form, to provide full information for each paper and participant. Be sure to enter the title of the proposed panel in the assigned field.

Abstracts will be published in the conference program in English and Portuguese.

Full Papers
Selected papers will be compiled and posted online (in a password protected folder), and all conference registrants will receive an email with the URL and password for access prior to the conference.

We are planning to publish selected papers in a journal, following the conference.

TIMELINE
– Launch – Conference website, online submission form at www.ces.uc.pt January 15, 2014
– Launch – Registration February 1, 2014
– Submission Deadline – using online submission form at www.ces.uc.pt February 14, 2014
– Selection decisions communicated to authors March 1, 2014
– Early Registration closes April 15, 2014
– Completed Papers Deadline – email to: MappingCulture@ces.uc.pt May 15, 2014
– Conference Presentation in Coimbra May 28-30, 2014

PROJECT PARTNERS and COLLABORATORS (so far)
– Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) / Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal Colégio das Artes, University of Coimbra
– The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
– Thompson Rivers University, Canada

QUESTIONS? Please contact Dr. Nancy Duxbury: duxbury@ces.uc.pt

REFERENCES
Clark, Sutherland & Young (1995). Keynote speech, Cultural Mapping Symposium and Workshop, Australia.
McLucas, Clifford (no date), There are ten things that I can say about these deep maps. Available: http://documents.stanford.edu/MichaelShanks/51.
Scherf, Kathleen (2013), The Multiplicity of Place; or, Deep Contexts Require Deep Maps, with an Example. Paper presented at World Social Science Forum, October 13, 2013.
Shanks, Michael; Pearson, Mike (2001), Theatre/Archaeology. New York: Routledge.
Stewart, Sue (2007). Cultural Mapping Toolkit. Vancouver: 2010 Legacies Now and Creative City Network of Canada. Available: http://www.creativecity.ca/database/files/library/cultural_mapping_toolkit.pdf

Architecture
and Culture / Transgression: body and space
Call
for Papers

To
transgress is to break, violate, infringe, or go beyond the bounds of accepted
norms or limits; such limits may be behavioural or cultural (embedded
in law, moral principle, taboo or other codified standards) or spatial.

We
would like to invite you to submit work for consideration for publication
in a special issue of the AHRA journal, Architecture and Culture on
the theme of “Transgression: body and space”. This issue will draw from
the 10th AHRA International conference on the subject of Transgression which
took place at the University of the West of England, Bristol UK, 21-23 November
2014. However, submissions are also very welcome from contributors who
did not attend the conference. This journal will be guest edited by David
Littlefield and Rachel Sara, who will work closely with the permanent editorial
team of Igea Troiani, Suzanne Ewing and Diana Periton.

This
special issue will explore the way in which the notion of transgression
allows us to explore the relationship between the body and space.
From Edgar Allen Poe to Georges Bataille, the history of transgression
is intimately bound up with ideas of the body, psychology, identity
and society. If, as Lefebvre argues, space is a social production, then
what role might transgression play? How can understandings of the body (what
it is; its relationship with mind, psyche and identity; the manner in which
it can enhanced, changed and adapted) affect our understanding and interpretation
of space? How can the relationship between the body and space be
(re)considered?

Architecture
and Culture welcomes explorations that are rigorously speculative,
purposively imaginative, visually and verbally stimulating. It solicits
essays, critical reviews, interviews, fictional narratives both in words
and images, art and building projects, and design hypotheses.

Papers
should be submitted electronically via Editorial Manager at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/archcult/
by the 27th January 2014. Notes for
contributors can also be found on this site. Contributors will be informed
of the result of the peer review process by Friday 7 March.

Papers, accepted
subject to revisions, must be completed by Monday 24 March. If
you have any queries or require further information, please contact: David
Littlefield: david.littlefield@uwe.ac.uk Rachel
Sara: Rachel.sara@uwe.ac.uk

Architecture
and Culture is the new journal of the Architectural Humanities Research
Association.

The
place of ‘place’ in wellbeing scholarship

Convenors

Juan
Pablo Sarmiento Barletti (University of St Andrews) email
Emilia Ferraro (University of St. Andrews) email

Proposals
for the panel *The Place of ‘Place’ in Wellbeing Scholarship *to be held at the
ASA’s meeting in June. Paper proposals should be submitted at

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2014/panels.php5?PanelID=2742
by January 5th
2014 (Sunday).

This
panel presents a forum for the critical engagement with conventional and
contrasting approaches and understandings of wellbeing. Our panel aims to: 1)
contribute to the emerging scholarship that calls for more complex and
culturally nuanced considerations of “the everyday business of living in
the world” (Whatmore 1999:30); 2) takes indigenous complex understandings
of the world and how to live in it seriously; 3) responds to recent calls for
“place-based” understandings of wellbeing; and 4) shows the
methodological contributions of rigorous ethnography to wellbeing scholarship.

Are
discussions of wellbeing not also ontological discussions of what it means to
be human? If so, do different understandings of “wellbeings” beget
different modes of humanities? The interdisciplinary nature of wellbeing
scholarship focuses mainly on affluent societies of the North, hence mainstream
ideas of wellbeing are framed within grand Western narratives of what it means
to be human. What does a consideration of “place” bring to current
understandings of wellbeing? In what ways do “alternative”
understandings of wellbeing based on different modes of humanity challenge
conventional ideas debated in mainstream scholarship and policy debates? Can
such understandings of wellbeing represent possible viable alternatives to
mainstream universalising concepts of wellbeing? We invite ethnographic and
non-ethnographic papers that reflect critically on the importance that
“place” as an empirical and ontological category plays in
considerations of wellbeing cross-culturally.

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2014/panels.php5?PanelID=2742

First Call for Papers: Sacred Space, Pilgrimage,
and Tourism

Conference:

RGS-IBG Annual
International Conference, London, Tuesday 26 to Friday 29 August 2014

Theme:

Geographies of
co-production

Conference chair:
Wendy Larner (University of Bristol)

Session sponsored by:
Geographies
of Leisure and Tourism Research Group (GLTRG) of the RGS-IBG

And convened by:
Jacky Tivers (St John’s College, Nottingham)

According to Park (1994,245), ‘one of the more
prominent geographical dimensions of religious expression is the notion of
sacred space’. Interest in this concept within human geography has
increased considerably in recent years (for instance, Hopkins et al, 2013;
Dwyer et al, 2013; Sturm, 2013; Megoran, 2013; Przybyiska, 2013; Dewsbury and
Cloke, 2009; Daniels, 2009; Holloway and Valins, 2002). Linked to the
idea of sacred space is the phenomenon of pilgrimage, which has been studied
through ‘a wide range of approaches – academic, confessional, personal and
canonical’ (Coleman and Elsner, 1995, 8), and which has also attracted the
attention of geographers (for example, Maddrell and della Dora, 2013).

Today, sacred space and pilgrimage are features of
all faiths and spiritualities, as well as being evident within the secular
realm, and are therefore important concepts to be considered in relation to
geographical understandings of places and their contexts. In addition, sacred
sites and pilgrimage routes may be re-imagined as tourism opportunities, both
by promoters and by tourists themselves. Indeed, Ron (2009,290) asserts that
pilgrimage is simply ‘a sub-type, or form, of tourism’, while Tidball (2004)
fears that it may very often show the same characteristics of ‘transience,
spectatorship, non-engagement with the local culture and moral
irresponsibility’ as tourism often does.

This session aims to investigate the co-production
of sacred space through the lens of pilgrimage/theology/spirituality/belief
systems, on the one hand, and that of tourism/leisure/promotion/visitor
behaviour, on the other, addressing practices at a range of scales –
individual, communal and commercial. Papers are invited which address
this issue of co-production specifically, as well as those that deal more
broadly with the concepts of sacred space and pilgrimage.

Abstracts of approximately 200 words should be
submitted to Jan Mosedale (jan.mosedale@htwchur.ch) by Friday, 14th February 2014.

Call for Papers for Volume 3, Issue no. 1 of the journal, Architecture and
Culture is titled ‘Architecture Film’
Issue edited by Dr Igea Troiani and Professor Hugh Campbell.

This aim of this issue of Architecture and Culture is to investigate how
the now expanded field of architecture utilises film studies, filmmaking
(feature film, short film, animation, stop motion animation or documentary)
or video/moving image making in practice, teaching or research, and what the consequences are of this interdisciplinary exchange.

While architecture and film have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs, the
possible intersection between them is less defined even though there is
considerable extant literature and research on this topic. Through this
call, we seek papers that investigate the ways in which practicing
architects, teachers of architecture and their students, and architectural
researchers, filmmakers, animators, documentary makers, social scientists or social geographers, anthropologists, landscape architects, urban designers,interior architects and installation artists are using film uniquely in their practice. We call for explorations of the way in which film contributes to architectural and filmic practice, knowledge and design,seeing the two disciplines side by side as equal, with no prepositions suggesting a specific relationship but at the same time creating a kind of distance and difference between the two.

We invite rigorously speculative, purposively imaginative, visually and
verbally stimulating contributions that explore architecture and film
through their own mode of argument – that combine text with sound or image
(moving or still), or that use text or image in investigative ways. We
encourage contributors to upload film, video or sound files relating to the
submission, as they will be accessible via the online publication of the
journal. Contributors are encouraged to submit parts of a script,
storyboard, mood board or sequential video grabs from the film or video
referred to in the paper. A maximum of 10 jpg images and 1 video per
submission will be accepted through our on-line submission system. We want
to explore how new digital technologies might impact on the form and content of an academic journal article.

Papers might address the following themes and questions:

– Designing in Practice and Film

Only a small number of practicing architects have made short or feature
fiction films. Most practicing architects use animation or 3D visualisations ‘for demonstration or selling’ their work, or are approached by or commission documentary makers or filmmakers to make documentaries or films of their architecture. Some architects adopt a less pragmatic approach,instead electing to use film or video to focus on existential space. Select social scientists or geographers have used video to record social relations in space. While it does exist, it is less common for architects to use live action footage as a part of their fieldwork studies or design research process. What are new and original ways in which practicing designers of
space can use film in their praxis? What expertise do architects need to
know about filmmaking to undertake inter-disciplinary architecture film
work? Can, and then how can, the making of videos or films better allow
architects to understand the cultural, social and environmental context of
sites to enable to them operate in a more engaging way with client/user
issues? What are the virtues that film and video can bring to
architectural/landscape/urban design/interior design? How can CG, VFX and
animation be used inventively to contribute to the practice of
architectural/landscape/urban/interior design? How can working with film or
video contemporise the architect’s practice?

– Architecture Film Pedagogy

Within schools of architecture, it is increasingly common to see the use of
experimental filmmaking or integration of film studies in the architectural
design studio or for site research. Within the architectural design studio,
teachers of architecture have speculated on how architecture and film might
be used methodologically to change the process of design or to incorporate
particular design requirements. Using animation to create animated
architecture is becoming more commonplace. Students are capable of making
and editing films easily and can therefore produce short films, videos and
animations quickly. What are new and original ways of using film in design
studio teaching? How might we better understand place, culture and identity
through using film in architectural studio research? Are there truly radical ways in which film can be used in teaching about the making of space and place?

– Architectural Research and Film

In their analyses of commercial and art house films, theoreticians and
historians regularly speculate on the ways in which film studies inform an
understanding of architecture and space. An uncommon form in which film is
used in architectural history research is the documentary, where oral
accounts can better be recorded. Another emergent form of architectural
filmmaking is in the production of short fiction films. How can making
documentaries or films enhance architectural research? To what extent can
researchers on architecture learn filmmaking? How have architects
collaborated with film industry experts in research? What is the difference
between working with real footage as opposed to fictional material in making architecture films?

The submission deadline is 10th March 2014, 5pm UK time. Accepted articles
will be published in March 2015.

For author instructions, please go to ‘Notes for Contributors’
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/journal/architecture-and-culture/

Upload
submissions at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/archcult/

If
you have any queries or require further information, please contact: Igea
Troiani: itroiani@brookes.ac.uk

Architecture
and Culture is the new journal of the Architectural HumanitiesResearch
Association http://www.ahra-architecture.org/