OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES
Call for Papers:

ELN 52.1 Spring/Summer 2014
“Imaginary Cartographies”

In recent decades the map has emerged as a key site of cultural and imaginative reworking, and yet the history of such symbolic mediations between humans and their spatial environment is also ancient and complex. Volume 52.1 of ELN (Spring/Summer 2014) will investigate “Imaginary Cartographies” across centuries and cultural contexts to explore a range of these symbolic mediations. “Imaginary Cartographies” includes those methods of mapping literary space that generate both imaginative and culturally revealing understandings of recognizable and/or created worlds and their modes of habitation. The term refers to actual as well as purely conceptual maps, and includes spaces of considerable variability: from the mapping of cosmic, global, or local space, to charting the spaces of the body or the page. Geographers have argued that the social history of maps, unlike that of literature, art, or music, has few genuinely popular, or subversive modes of expression because maps pre-eminently are a language of power, not of protest; in this view, the map remains a site of territorial knowledge and state power, authority and jurisdiction, social codes and spatial disciplines—one intent upon eliding its tactile and material conditions of production. “Imaginary Cartographies” welcomes approaches to mapping that complicate this account by considering subaltern or alternative cartographies—cartographies that elude, interrupt, or disperse forms of power, or serve not-yet-imagined spectrums of interests.

Contributors may wish to present recent research findings on particular writers, cultural figures, or texts, or they may venture insights on broadly defined subjects, such as the aesthetics or politics of imaginary cartographies in a particular cultural or historical instance; on what constitutes cartographic assumptions or practices about space, nature, cosmology, or exploration at particular historical moments; on how cartography intersects with broader issues of knowledge creation and management, or the history of capital and conquest; or on the entanglement of literary theory with debates about (digitally) mapping texts individually or categorically. Papers on literature and particular cartographic practices are welcome: e.g. psychogeography, geomancy, cognitive mapping, digital mapping, and so on. Actual maps that are in some way conversant with literary concerns are also welcome.

Position papers and essays of no longer than twenty-five manuscript pages are invited from scholars in all fields of literature, geography, history, philosophy, and the arts. Along with analytical, interpretive, and historical scholarship, we are also interested in creative work that moves traditional forms of literary analysis into new styles of critical writing. The editors also encourage collaborative work and are happy to consider works that are submitted together as topical clusters. Another format that we invite is a debate or conversation between or among contributors working on a related aspect of cartography.

Essays will be reviewed by external readers; all submissions should adhere to the Chicago-style endnote citation format. Please email double-spaced, 12-point font, .pdf file submissions to to:

Managing Editor
English Language Notes

eln2@colorado.edu

Specific inquiries regarding issue 52.1 may be addressed to the issue editor, Karen Jacobs: (Karen.Jacobs@colorado.edu).

The deadline for inquiries and abstracts is November 15, 2013; submissions deadline is December 15, 2013.

Coventry University Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) is pleased to invite you to the Digital Echoes symposium

Wednesday 8th January 2014; 10:00-17:00

Institute for Creative Enterprise, Coventry University, Parkside, Coventry

Convenors: Professor Sarah Whatley (Coventry University) and Dr Sarah Atkinson (University of Brighton)

Attendance fee: £30 (includes light lunch and refreshments);

Booking is essential.

Digital Echoes 2014 builds on the previous three ‘Digital Echoes’ events
and will bring together researchers, artists, educators, professionals
and practitioners from the field of digital archives and the archiving
of practice with an emphasis upon Art, Design,
Media, Film and Performing arts disciplines. The focus will be on
expanding dialogues across the arts and humanities to explore the
affordances of digital technologies upon archival practices.

Within digital archival practices, there is a notable shift from the
closed to the open and from the traditional single-user archive model to
emerging multi-user, collaborative forms of archival practices and
scholarship. The digital preservation and presentation
of archival materials dramatically impacts upon the nature and notion
of access. The types of discoveries, insights and findings that can be
made through online digital interfaces can be radically altered.

We now invite proposals to contribute presentations for the day, which
might focus on any aspect of digital archives, that consider national
and international collections, which might focus on archival strategies,
policy, copyright and education, and which
consider technological aspects of digital archiving including the
semantic web, analytics, meta-data, tagging and time-based meta-data. We
are interested in encouraging contributions from a range of contexts,
originating from academic research, policy making
and from the archival professions. We are also particularly interested
in contributions that examine the impact on digital archiving practices
on teaching and learning within a higher education context. Those
interested in presenting on the day should send
a short abstract (200 words max) together with names of presenter/s,
contact details, brief 100 word biog and any technical requests to researchadmin.ad@coventry.ac.uk. The
deadline for submissions is 30 November 2013.

Presenters will also be invited to submit to a special issue of
Convergence (Vol. 21, no 1), edited by Sarah Atkinson and Sarah Whatley,
that focuses on this same theme: Digital Archives and Open Archival Practices. Submission of full papers to the
Editors by February 28 2014. Full details about how to submit are available here: http://con.sagepub.com

Further information about the day and how to register to attend the event can be found on the C-DaRE website: www.c-dare.co.uk or
email researchadmin.ad@coventry.ac.uk

Deadline for proposals: Friday, 10th January 2014.

From
their earliest inception, film and television have been concerned with
the registration of place through the unique capacity of the audiovisual
moving image to convey the experience of locale over time. In recent
years, screen studies has engaged with the politics of location
especially through the site of the cinematic city and inter-related
questions of modernity, architecture and urban cultural transformation.
The main theme of this year’s Screen conference will offer an
opportunity to extend critical debate into the fields of landscape and
the environment. In so doing, it will offer an exciting range of
inter-disciplinary perspectives in order to reflect on the real and
imaginary ways that we interact with the world through the portal of the
screen.

Martin
Lefebvre has argued that landscape manifests itself as an
interpretative gaze. It is anchored in human life not just as something
to look at but to live in socially as a cultural form. Cultural
geography now argues that landscape must not only be understood as the
outcome of interactions of nature and culture, but that practices of
landscaping such as walking, looking, driving and, of course, filmmaking
might also be the origin of our ideas about what ‘nature’ and ‘culture’
actually are. If human investment toward space produces the notion of
landscape, what then are the principal ways in which the moving image
articulates this process? How have film and television articulated the
necessary tension between embodied immersion within a specific
topographical space and critical reflection on the specific historical
and cultural contexts that shape global screen culture past and
present?

The
Screen Studies Conference, one of the longest running and most
successful events of its kind in the world, welcomes proposals for
papers/panels on any of these questions and on the following topics
related to the main conference theme (as usual, proposals for other
subjects beyond this focus will also be considered):

· The representation of geographically and historically specific screen landscapes

· Environmental politics and screen cultures

· Genre, narrative and the landscape

· Phenomenology and screen landscapes

· Landscape and television culture

· Journeys and landscapes: walking and travelling on screen

· The landscapes of world cinema

· Landscape and environment: autobiography, history, memory

· Screen cultures within the environment

· The dialectics of place and non-place in film and video

· Site-specific screening practices

To submit a proposal, please visit http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/conference2014/

CENTRE FOR CRITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MEMORY

14-16 MAY 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

The politics of remembering and forgetting are important social and cultural issues. The authority, power and resources with which to create hegemonic versions of the past – to give authoritative accounts that are available in the public domain – are largely the property of institutions. Questions of power, voice, representation and identity are central to Cultural and Collective Memory.

This interdisciplinary conference will address how hegemonic narratives of the past are reproduced or challenged. It will examine the role of Cultural and Collective Memory in shaping meanings, values and identities. Papers are encouraged to address the relationship between past and present in Cultural and Collective Memory and how this relates to social power relations.

Papers are welcome in areas such as:

• Cultural memory and the archive
• Curating memory
• Globalised memory
• Marginalised histories
• Memory and affect
• Memory and anti-colonial struggle
• Memory and class
• Memory as gender/sexual politics
• New technologies and memory
• Public history
• Racialised memory
• Religion and cultural memory
• Space, place and memory
• Theoretical approaches to cultural and collective memory

Please send a 300 word extract and a short CV to: cpm@cardiff.ac.uk

Deadline for the receipt of abstracts: 31 January 2014

Cinema and the postindustrial city

Call for papers
Association of American Geographers Annual
Meeting
8-12 April 2014 Tampa FL

Organiser: Johan Andersson, Department of
Geography, King’s College London

This session explores how the economic reorganisation of the city since the
1960s has impacted on the production, distribution, and mise-en-scène of urban
cinema. While there is a significant literature in economic geography on
post-Fordist changes in the film industry, this session specifically welcomes
scholarship that links the interconnected restructuring of the city and the
film industry with visual, aesthetic and narrative developments in urban
cinema. Such approaches may focus on how new trends in on-location shooting,
technical innovations (with regards to sound, lighting, digital animation,
lighter equipment and so on) and changes in the distribution of film (TV, video
and online) have resulted in novel modes of representing the city. Close readings
of individual films or genres that explore the changing occupational class
structure of post-Fordist cities (yuppie, ghetto and gentrification films as
well as corporate and legal thrillers for example) or the identity politics
associated with new urban social movements (feminist cinema, New Queer Cinema,
representations of race) are particularly welcome.

Topics may include but are not limited
to:

Representations of urban
space/landscape

The political economy of film
industries in postindustrial cities and the role of film/television in the
cultural economy of cities

Film as urban branding

The politics and economics of
on-location shooting

Theoretical approaches to space/place
in contemporary film studies, and to the moving image in urban studies

The gendered, racialised, and sexual
geographies of urban cinema

Representations of class

The hedonistic city in film

Urban crisis and cinema

Abstracts of up to 250 words to Johan Andersson by October 1, 2013.

University of Tartu, Estonia
October 30 – November 1, 2013

The Sixth Autumn Conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) focuses on the issues of embodiment, personhood, subjectivity, and experience, as well as on the connection of these concepts with the understanding of cultural identity. The notion of identity is often treated in the framework of controversial efforts of dialogic interpretation. Recognising the individuality of the studied subjects, it becomes tricky to merge a variety of self-understandings into a coherent whole. Identity appears to us as an interconnected play of superficial and fundamental, ideological and physical, essentialised and dialogic. The conceptual initiative of our conference is inspired by these controversial cognitive dimensions. We encourage our colleagues to develop theoretical and empirical approaches through a conceptual matrix that focuses primarily on the proposed concepts of understanding and interpreting cultural identity.

Panel I: Revisiting key issues in the methodology of studying culture: reflexivity, representation and experience
Panel II: Negotiating embodied experiences
Panel III: Learning landscapes: stories, senses and sensitization
Panel IV: Dynamics between public and private
Panel V: Death as the transformation of personhood

Key Dates and Deadlines:
Abstracts Due: June 1st, 2013
Acceptance Notification: July 1st, 2013
Registration Deadline: September 15th, 2013
Full Paper Submission: October 15th, 2013

http://www.ut.ee/CECT/tegevus/sygiskonverentsid.html