CFP: Space and Place

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” constructed a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; and 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 practioners 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
• 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. Situated 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

3. Contested spaces

• 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
• 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
• 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 places

4. Representations of place and space

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

Papers on any other topic related to the theme will also be considered.

This project will run concurrently with our project on Reframing Punishment – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of Space or Place or in relation to crossover panel(s).

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords E-mails should be entitled: SP 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). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer 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:

Matt Melia
Conference Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Kingston University, United Kingdom
E-mail: [email protected]

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: [email protected]