Space and Place

Theme: Space and Place
Type: 5th Global Conference
Institution: Inter-Disciplinary.Net
   Mansfield College, University of Oxford
Location: Oxford (United Kingdom)
Date: 3.–5.9.2014

Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we
experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and
imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other”
constructing a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement;
while ideology constructs a national identity based upon the
dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and
place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either
through the art of reconstruction of a known space or in establishing
a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics,
power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is
the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter-
and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and
other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices
of space and place. We seek submissions from a range of disciplines
including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and
creative arts, philosophy and politics and also actively encourage
practitioners and non-academics with an interest in the topic to
participate.

We welcome traditional papers, preformed panels of papers, workshop
proposals and other forms of performance – recognising that different

disciplines express themselves in different mediums. Submissions are
sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following:

1. Theorising Space and Place
- Philosophies and space and place
- Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of
  contemporary life
- Space and place as realms of becoming
- Rhizomatics and/or postmodernist constructions of space as a
  “meshwork of paths” (Ingold: 2008)
- The relationship between spatiality and temporality/space as a
  temporal-spatial event (Massey: 2005)
- The language and semiotics of space and place

2.The situation and location of Identities
- Gendered spaces including the tension between domestic and public
  spheres
- Work spaces and hierarchies of power
- Geographies and archaeologies of space including Orientalism and
  Occidentalism
- Ethnic spaces/ethnicity and space

- Disabled spaces/places
- Queer places and spaces
- Alterity and its relationship to the production of space and place
- Spatialities in Rural areas of nature
- Queer Ruralities
- Dangerous Nature vs. Civilisation

3. The Contestation of Existing Spaces and Places
- Contemporary local and global political insurgencies and the
  politics of occupation in urban spaces and places, including the
  Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the London Riots and the incursion
  by M23 into the DRC
- The economic, political, social and cultural contestation of urban
  space and its effect upon the production of place

- The politics and ideology of constructions and discourses of space
  and place including the construction of gated communities as a
  response to real/imagined terrorism, class politics, or ethnic and
  cultural heterogeneity
- The relationship between power, knowledge and the construction of
  place and space
- Territorial wars, both real and imagined

- The relationship between the global and the local and their
  relationship to space and place
- Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction
  of lived spaces
- Space and place from colonisation to globalisation
- Real and imagined maps/cartographies of place
- Transnational and translocal spaces and places

4. Representations of place and space
- Embodied/disembodied spaces
- Lived spaces and the places of the architecture of identity
- Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
- Set design the construction of space and the representation of
  place in film, television and theatre
- Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the
  creative arts
- Technology and developments in the representation of space and
  place including new media technologies and 3D technologies of
  viewing
- Future cities/futurology and the future of urban space and place
- Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative
  arts
- The spaces and places of and within digital gaming and digital games

5. Networks of Mobility and the Relationship to Movement and Space
- The spaces of flows
- Mobility, movement, and their effects upon the production and
  ontology of space and place
- Non-spaces and their relationship to mobility and movement
- The space of Immobile mobiles (Urry, Castells) and their effects
  upon the nature of place
- The places of mobility

Organising Chairs:

Rob Fisher: [email protected]

The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of research projects,
which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It
aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to
share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and
challenging. All proposals accepted for and presented at the
conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in
an ISBN eBook. Selected proposals may be developed for publication
in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference
will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the
conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and
professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should
attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to
make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for
presentation.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and
we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistenc.

For further details of the conference, please visit: