CFP IMAGINING SPACES/PLACES

CALL FOR PAPERS
See the attachment (pdf) and web-page:
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/imagining-spaces-places/
IMAGINING SPACES/PLACES
An international interdisciplinary conference
24-26 August 2011
University of Helsinki, Finland
Literature and art mediate our experiences of the spaces and places    surrounding us as well as within us. In contemporary discussion we    use, besides the old term ‘landscape’, other ‘scapes’ which reflect a    new interest and new thinking with regard to spaces: we speak of   cityscapes,bodyscapes, mindscapes  and even memoryscapes,and their   relationships to one another. The  intertwining of what, of old, was   called ‘macrocosm’ (nature and  society) and ‘microcosm’ (body and   mind) and the role various art  forms and media play in articulating   and negotiating these chiasmic  encounters is the focal point of the   Imagining spaces/places  conference. How are the interfaces between   ‘the place in you and you in the place’ depicted? How are these   imagined and material  landscapes gendered and sexualized?
The conference seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between    art history, literature and gender studies. We welcome papers  addressing
issues of representing and creating spaces in literature, art or film,    and emphasizing the gendered, emotional and political or  ideological   character of these cultural mediations and remediations.  Suggestions   for possible approaches:
LANDSCAPES
– landscapes as medium for political, religious, psychological themes
– landscape as pictures vs. (nature) as process
– man in landscape; space, place, genius loci as objective places or    subjective experiences
– borderlines between nature and culture/cultural landscape and wilderness
CITYSCAPES
– urban spaces and urban people
– city images and chronotopes
– the idea of metropolis
– gendered/utopist/political/

public/private city
MINDSCAPES
– invisible cities and erewhons: fantasies of places and spaces and    their role in arts
– allegories of mind
– dreams and other alternatives to actual world(s)
BODYSCAPES
– bodies and belongings
– affective, material, represented bodies
– postcolonial corporealities
– bodies of knowledge
MEMORYSCAPES
– sites of mediations of past, present, future
– methods of memorializations: regimes, archives, museums
– collective memory (nation and nation building)/private memory
– missing past, negative heritage (palimpsest traditions), melancholia

Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 2011.
Keynotes:
– Claire Farago, Professor of Early Modern Art, Theory, and Criticism,    University of Colorado, Boulder.
– Bart Keunen, Professor in Comparative Literature, Ghent University, Belgium.
– Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College,   University of London.

For more information and to fill in the electronic abstract submission    form, please visit the conference website at:
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/imagining-spaces-places/
Conference Organizers:
Finnish Doctoral Programme in Art History
Finnish Graduate School of Literary Studies
Finnish Research School in Women’s and Gender Studies.

CFP Engaging space, Performing place: ‘making place’ through expressive practice – Lisbon – April 2011

The SIEF conference – People make places: ways of feeling the world – taking place in Lisbon, 17-21 April 2011 is open for individual paper proposals*.
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/sief/sief2011/panels.php5

We would like to invite the submission of paper proposals for the following panel:

Panel title:   Engaging space, Performing place: ‘making place’ through expressive practice (P222)

In this panel we would like to explore how people engage with space in performative and other expressive practices. We want to focus on how, in these practices, reflexive (sensory) experience is used to ‘make’ meaningful places, which can be imagined or real, public or private.

We take as our starting point the notion that expressive/performative practices are embedded in and contingent upon socio-cultural context, and that they are brought into being through, and are dependent on, the engagement of individuals/groups with their physical and social environment; in short, that they are em-placed and em-bodied expressions of  ‘being-in-the-world’ (Csordas, 1999).

We would like to invite proposals for papers that reflect, theoretically and/or empirically, on current notions of space and place in a variety of disciplines – such as geographer Doreen Massey’s (2005) perception of space as a ‘spatio-temporal event’ or anthropologists’ Tim Ingold’s (2008) notion of place as a ‘meshwork of paths’ ‘occurring’ through the movement of people and other organisms through space, or Paul Stoller’s work on embodiment and sensuous scholarship -, and that relate this reflection on space and place to the practice of expressive performance, stressing the relationship between bodies and minds and the materiality and sensoriality of place.

Maria Krom, PhD Researcher, CRIA-Center for the Research in Anthropology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Anthony McCann, Lecturer in Contemporary Folk Culture, University of Ulster

*NOTE:

Papers may not be proposed by emailing convenors directly. The call for papers is detailed on the SIEF website (see link above).  There is a page of information/instruction and then a link to the list of panels/workshops.  All papers must be proposed online via the website.  The method is as follows.  Beneath the long abstract of each panel is a link saying “Propose a paper”.  Click on that and complete the online form, asking for contact details, a title, short and long abstract, any AV requirements, and the contact details of any co-authors. On conclusion of this process, you will receive an email confirming your submission.  The panel convenors will also receive such an email, alerting them to your proposal. Deadline: 15 October 2010