CFP: 5th Global Interdisciplinary Time, Space and the Body Conference

Time, Space + Body Conference Sunday 30th August – Tuesday 1st September 2015

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

The Time, Space + Body CFP closes 1 May, 2015

This interdisciplinary conference project seeks to critically examine the foundations, structures, relationships, politics and practices surrounding the categories of time, space and the body. Our aim is to question the ways in which we construct and experience such things as pre-worlds, this world, other worlds, non-humans, humans, post/trans-humans, boundaries, liminality, flows and differing forms of time. We encourage an examination of time, space and/or the body as interconnecting areas suspended in ‘webs of significance’ Geertz (1973). Exploring within these ‘webs’ it becomes apparent that this world consists of people who constantly participate in specific tasks at particular times and in constructed spaces. For example, Turner (2004:38) has suggested ‘every society is confronted by four tasks: the reproduction of populations in time, the regulation of bodies in space, the restraint of the interior body through disciplines and the representation of the exterior body in social space.’ While these tasks are a good starting point we seek to go beyond them.   Accordingly we seek presentations that explore how time, space and the body are understood, mythologised and constructed in order to affect, effect, subvert and/or control each other.

At the end of the conference, our aim is to further develop the discussions and dialogues presented at this conference into new and continued interdisciplinary research, workshops and publications which will help us make sense of the contested categories of time, space and the body. To this end all proposals accepted for and presented at the conference 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 who will be chosen from interested delegates attending the conference. Further to this workshops will be developed in line with delegate ideas and suggestions.

Topics can include any of the following themes and related areas:

1) Understanding Space, Time and/or the Body:
- Theories, Philosophies and/or Methods
– Narratives, semiotics, definitions and/or perceptions
– Interdisciplinary studies, cross cultural comparisons
– Institutions, organisations, constructions, and deconstructions
– How access to information in space, time and/or the body is controlled, distorted and facilitated

2) Contexts for Space, Time and/or the Body:
- Architecture: the construction and constraints of space in or out of time
– Art, sculpture and installation practices
– Work and/or power as a temporal-spatial event
– Time and the spatiality of movement,
– City planning and change over time or terrain
– History and public/social policy changes towards crime and punishment
– Age and the impact of space and time
– Liminality, Boundaries and/or control

3) Representations of Time, Space and/or the Body:
- Language and embodied/disembodied characters in literature, film, theatre, TV, graphic novels, games:
– Narrative, music and mis-en-scene
– Different genres over time: changes in interpretation, popularity and
relevancy
– Novels, plays, poems, short stories and time (eg: short time span, the inter-generational epic – how does this work, what are the impacts?)
– Voice, dance and/or music
– Time as the ‘enemy’
– Embodiment/disembodiment

4) Relationships within Time, Space and/or the Body:
- The body as a place and space for storytelling (eg: the body as victim/survivor, tattoos)
– Non-human or post-human bodies in space and time
– The ‘body politic’ or the political body: Who ‘owns’ the body? e.g. patient or practitioner or …? Coloniser or colonised or ..?
– Monetising/economics of production between time, space and body
– Accounting: the consequences of periodic reporting and impact on the
valuation of space
– Legislative/legal constructions as related to time, space, body
– Changing attitudes toward: pain, death, suffering, religion, family, gender,
sexuality, disability or fashion

5) Experiencing Time, Space and/or the Body:
- Contested time, spaces and/or bodies
– Time, ‘performativity’ and identity
– Religion, spirituality, forms of altered consciousness and/or ritual
– Indigenous cultures and cosmologies in space and/or time
– Cyclical, spiral, dreamtime, memory or linear time
– Doing Time: space and punishment
– Body modification and body horror
– Emotions or rationality: reactions to time-space, particularly bodies in public spaces (eg: how do we ‘feel’ when … can that reaction be replicated, can it impact or trigger other reactions?)
– Monstrosity, technology and futurology

What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 1st May 2015. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th July 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: TSB5 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:
Dr Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith: [email protected]

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 subsistence.