We are excited to host our conference „Contesting Place: Practices of (Un)Doing“ in Eichstätt on June 26-27, 2025. More information including the programme will be shared here soon! Stay tuned!
The conference addresses new political confrontations, ecological challenges, and heightened social polarizations, conflicts in practices of place are intensifying. Encounters with place across the humanities and social sciences often focus on matters of identification and delineation: that is, on making and doing place. Yet, every emplacement entails displacement. Understanding places as configurations of conflict raises questions on the entanglements of (un)doing that this conference seeks to centre, by exploring de-stabilisation, dis-location, and de identification as practicing place. Within our research training group “Practicing Place. Socio-Cultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations”, we supplement the question of what is a place with the question of how it is continuously designed and produced, from a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective. Our work thus far has informed an orientation toward conflictuality and for this conference we invite proposals on contestation as situated and situating. How are places undone and thereby made in a praxis of contestation, both materially imaginatively, simultaneously and through time?
Contesting established histories, epistemologies, and seemingly stable grounds involves denaturalizing – indeed, displacing – accepted modes of thought. Research in the environmental humanities, for instance, has made apparent the multiple and opposing strategies of appropriation and exploitation which politicise landscapes, such as in locally mobilised struggles against extraction, coal mining and land grabbing. From a posthumanist perspective, landscapes are gatherings of diverse ways of being in the making; they are not intentionally designed but emerge through imaginative and material entanglements. Further, sociological and cultural studies approaches to placings of the political are being rethought as publics are enclosed across privatised city squares as well as the digital agora and as geographies of accumulation are reinscribed across shifting labour markets and border regimes. Contact zones come into view in which universalizing fictions of the West are challenged by pluriversal narratives deriving from local histories. Click here to read our full Call for Papers.
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