Call for Presentations
Space and Place
The Space and Place Project: 7th Global Meeting
Thursday 1st September – Saturday 3rd September 2016
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Space and place affect the very way in which we experience, understand,
navigate and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and
imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against marginalised
individuals, groups and populations, constructing a lived landscape of
inclusion and exclusion. Space and place are also the focus of the
creation and contestation of uncontainable mobilities — be they human,
identities, cultures, meanings, information, finances and objects — that
are causing geographies to shift and change. Moreover, the existence of
space and place are (is?) irrevocably intertwined with, and created by,
technologies, communication and culture, knowledge, politics,
economics, power and lived experience. Understanding spatial
relationships and the tensions and dynamics that inform them enables us
to gain important insights into the processes that configure the spaces
and places that we move through, inhabit and live in, as well as the
nature of our existence.
Now in its seventh year, Space and Place: Exploring Critical
Issues is an established annual interdisciplinary conference project that
encourages critical and collegial dialogue. Recognising that different disciplines
and practices express themselves through different modes, media and formats we
strongly encourage the submission of proposals from creative practitioners –
artists, architects, writers, photographers, painters, film-makers, performers,
urban planners – as well as people from related professions, industries and
activities and alternative forms of performance. Critical accounts and
descriptions of problem-solving activities from ongoing projects that function
to alter the nature space and place as well as from projects that are in
development are also most welcome. We also strongly encourage traditional
papers, panels and workshop proposals.
We seek to create a dialogue amongst individuals and groups
who are concerned about the complex nature of space and place. Performances,
presentations, reports, works-in-progress, papers and workshops are invited on
issues related to any of the following themes:
1. Theorising space and place:
How do space and place exist? What aspects of human, and
non-human behaviour act upon and constitute space and place? From Deleuze to
Latour to Hayles; from theories of becoming to Actor-Network Theory to New
Materialism, space and place have become increasingly important dimensions to
social and political thought.
2. The situation and location of identities in space and
place:
How is our sense of self and our relationship to others
constituted through our existence in space and place? How do space and place
interpellate the subject? How do human endeavours affect the constitution of
space and place and in so doing affect the nature of our sense of self? How
have the gradual decline of the nation-state and the ascendance of the network
state (Castells) affected the relationship between the national identities of
subjects and the state within which they were born?
3. The space and place of the networked home:
The concept and structure of the home has, and continues, to
occupy a privileged position in human existence. How do the Internet, new media
and the build out of connected devices, appliances and other technologies
increasingly found in the home change the nature of the home as a space and our
place within it.
4. The creation and contestation of existing spaces and
places:
How have existing spaces and places been created in the
past, and how are they lived in at present. Can we say that our existence in a
given space or place is ever and always without some form of contestation? If
not, then how is our living in an existing space or place contested in the
present? What does this mean for our existence as individuals, groups and
communities in terms of the spaces and places that we inhabit? How is the
distinction between the public and private ownership of space affected by this
ongoing contestation?
5. The repurposing of existing spaces and places:
What are the processes- local, national, global – that lead
to the repurposing of existing spaces and places? How do these processes, and
the restructuring that they lead to, affect the existence of individuals and
groups who have made use of these spaces and places prior to their repurposing?
What do they foretell for future acts of repurposing? What is the relationship
between the repurposing of spaces and places and their reclamation?
6. Representations of space and place in the media, film,
literature, TV, theatre, the fine arts and performance:
Space and place have long been privileged, if unspoken
subjects for the fine arts, literature and film. We seek presentations by
artists, authors, photographers and filmmakers who wish to share their
completed or on-going visions of space and place. We also welcome critical
readings of these modes of expression and depiction of both space and place.
7. The spaces and places of social media:
How do social media exist as social space and places of
congregation? Are these spaces and places disrupting the fabric of our offline
existence, or do they merely supplement it? How do these new places and spaces
of sociability affect our sense of self and our relationship to others?
8. The nature and production of virtual space:
William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1984, and
described it as a “consensual hallucination.” Can we not, however, think of
cyberspace literally, as a space or place? If so, then how, and how does this
new spatial construct affect the lives of those who have come to inhabit
cyberspace?
9. Mobile communication technologies and new urban spaces
and places:
Have the mobile phone and the tablet compressed space, or
have they extended our presence amongst others across space? Do the mobile
phone and the tablet enable us to inhabit new places? If so, then how are these
places constituted, and how are they inhabited?
10. Knowledge clusters, new industries and the globally
networked city:
What are the processes through which this is occurring in
the early 21st century? How are space and place rearticulated through these
processes? What are the strategies and tactics that are being deployed to
resist the dislocation that accompanies the build out of these industrial
networks?
11. Networks of mobility and their relationship to movement,
space and place:
The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have often
been characterised by the by the increasing movement and mobility of people,
objects, information, cultural meanings and financial instruments through
increasingly complex and extensive networks of mobility – both physical and
digital. How do these networks change the nature of space and place in the
early 21st century? What types of spaces and places exist within these
networks? Are we fated to solely inhabit spaces within these networks? Do
localised places exist as counterpoints to these networks, or will networks of
mobility eventually envelope all forms of the local? How does our sense of self
and our relationship to others change as a result of our increased mobility and
movement through these networks and across space?
12. The spaces and places of global tourism:
Tourism not only participates as a key industry in the
networks of mobility, but in so doing radically reconfigures the existing
spaces and places of the destinations that people go to – politically,
economically and industrially to name but three dimensions of these effects.
How does global tourism recreate the spaces and places of the destinations that
it profits from?
13. Practice based proposals, research and reports on space
and place:
As noted, above, critical accounts and descriptions of
problem-solving activities from ongoing projects that function to alter the
landscape of space and place – urban renewal, housing development, the
development of new forms of mobility, to name just three – as well as from
projects that are in development, are also most welcome.
Please note: These criteria are by no means definitive.
Presentations on any other topic related to the general theme are welcome and
will most certainly be considered.
Supporting the conference’s interdisciplinary character, the
organizers propose to establish a dialogue between the parallel meetings running
during this event. Delegates are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each
of the concurrent conferences.
Call for Cross-Over Presentations:
The Space and Place project will be meeting at the same time
as a project on Food and another project on Videogames. We welcome submissions
which cross the divide between both project areas. If you would like to be
considered for a cross project session, please mark your submission “Crossover
Submission”.
What to Send:
300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of
contribution should be submitted by Friday 1st April 2016. All submissions be
minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global
panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In
practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted,
it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.
You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 15th
April 2016.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution
should be submitted by Friday 27th May 2016.
Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad 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: Space and Place Abstract Submission
Organising Chairs:
This event is an inclusive interdisciplinary research and
publishing project. It aims to bring together people from different areas and
interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative
and exciting.
A number of eBooks and paperback books have been published
or are in press as a result of the work of this project. All papers accepted
for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for
publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers 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.
Ethos:
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.
