Re-visioning Space (s), Time and Bodies

Institute of Interdisciplinary Inquiry Inaugural Conference

Venue: State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

9-11 April, 2015: Main Conference

8 April, 2015: 1-day Writing and Publishing Workshop

Re-visioning Space (s), Time and Bodies

Throughout history our understandings of categories such as space(s), time, and bodies have changed. Living in a more than human world, we have constructed these categories into systems of shared, and often unquestioned, meaning. This method of organising knowledge acquisition has a tendency to construct boundaries or borders which conceal the complex nature and varied connections between spatiality, instances of time and understandings of bodies. Accordingly, this conference seeks to challenge the dominant ways of understanding categories of space, time and bodies by using both multi/interdisciplinary subject matter and research methods to explore the changing dimensions of: time and movement, aspects of human/post/trans and/or non-human beings, contested flows, ‘webs’, and networks as well as the connections between these concepts.

This multi and interdisciplinary conference sets out to open up new insights and a conversation between the arts, humanities, business studies and natural/social sciences. This will be done by encouraging delegates to use their research interests as a precursor to forming links between their topic and its relationship(s) with space, time and/or bodies. Papers are not expected to cover all three areas but delegates will include two of the three ways of knowing or perceiving our constantly changing world. We also invite abstracts from practitioners and non-academics who have an interest in the topic.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

- Methodologies, theories, research methods and practices

- Architecture: bodies, variations, boundaries, space(s) and time

- Art, opera, film, poetry or theatre: production in space and time or/and through bodies or perception

- Forms of time: memory, dream-time, history, cyclical, spiral, or linear

- Bodies, time & space representation: language, literature, popular culture, sculpture, installations and photography

- Changing attitudes toward: death, suffering, beauty, religion, family, pain, gender, punishment, fashion, sexuality, disability and space or bodies

- Gothic spaces, bodies, monsters, body horror, body modification

- Getting older: maintenance and the impact of space and time

- Dance, music, gesture: spatiality of movement, stasis, synchronisation, duration

- Current trends: technology and futurology in space and bodies

- City development and planning: open-space, liminality and/or boundaries

- Changing climates, terrain, politics, the ‘body politic’ and/or the political body in spaces, places and time

- Music, songs and mis-en-scene in relation to time and/or space 

- The significance of work and/or power relations on the body in time and space

- Space, time and the body: graphic novels, computer games, internet, social media

- Myth, ritual, altered consciousness, indigenous cultures, spirituality and/or cosmology

- Calculative practices and time, space and bodies

- Heroes and/or villains in places and throughout time

- Legal/legislative constructions, punishments, prisons and shame over time and in space

- Disability and space-time Changing genres: embodiment/disembodiment

- Performativity, identity, the voice, emotions and/or the senses in everyday life

This conference is being held at the State Library of New South Wales. We encourage you to take advantage of the Library’s digital collections and at least one panel will be focused on using the libraries collections to further the aims of interdisciplinary research about space(s), time and bodies. For example, we suggest taking advantage of Discover Collections, the various sets of Open Data now available or some of the digitised World War I materials as being very useful starting points for interacting, through an interdisciplinary lens, with the Library’s extensive collections to explore themes of time, space and bodies.

At the conclusion of the Re-visioning Space(s), Time and Bodies Conference, we intend to develop the debates and conversations from across the conference into ongoing research projects and publications. All presenters who fully attend and present papers will be eligible for publication in an eBook. Selected proposals may also be developed into an interdisciplinary focused hard copy volume(s). To this end, for those interested in developing their paper, we are holding a one-day interactive interdisciplinary writing and publishing workshop 8 April, 2014.

To apply: please email a 250-300 word abstract or 3-paper panel proposal. This should be submitted to the Research Leads: Dr Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith ([email protected]) by 12 February, 2015.

Abstracts should be compatible with a .doc format, and contain the following information: author(s) email address affiliation title and body of abstract

All abstract emails will be acknowledged. If you have not had a response within a week please re-send your abstract as it may not have reached us.

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith

www.iiinz.org/call-for-papers.html