Events

November 17.-19., 2022, Amerikahaus Munich

Organized by Dr. Nathalie Aghoro in cooperation with the Bavarian American Academy and supported by the DFG and the KU

The conference aims at examining the environments that video games affect and are impacted by. It engages with the notion of ecology as a critical concept that not only allows to study the intermedial, social, and cultural relations that constitute video games and gaming culture. The term also suggests reflections on the impact of gaming and virtual worlds in mainstream media ecologies as well as video game conceptions of human, posthuman, and natural environments.

The theme of video game ecologies seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations on the cultural, literary, political, social, and ecological discourses pertaining to the medium. As Megan Condis writes: “Each game utilizes different mechanics to describe and model the relationship between the playercharacter and his or her environment, resulting in a different argument about the type of world we inhabit—or the one we might inhabit in the future” (“Live in Your World, Play in Ours” 90). The conference serves as a platform to reflect on the structures, relations, and imaginations involved in these world building practices and the environments they participate in and create.

You can find a PDF-version of the program here.

To register for the conference, please go to:
www.ku.de/en/slf/american-studies/conferences

The conference takes place in KAP 209. We will be streaming the keynotes on YouTube. If you would like to receive the links to the streams, please subscribe to our newsletter. We will send them out shortly before the keynotes.

You can download the conference’s booklet here including all the abstracts and additional information about the event.

Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Pre-conference Programme

2.00 Guided Walking Tour

7.00 Pre-Conference Dinner (Krone)

Rolling Exhibition Space in Kloster (set up on 9th, open across 10th and 11th )

Activating Space | Prehending the City (installation) by Rémy Bocquillon (KU Eichstätt)

Thursday, 10 November 2022

9.00 Welcome coffee and opening remarks

9.30 Tim Cresswell (University of Edinburgh): On Routes

11.00 Coffee Break

11.20 Panel 1: Sensing and Storying

Craig Melhoff (University of Regina)
Environmental Sensemaking and the Body as Cartographic Organizing Principle in the Poetry of the London Underground

Ian Grosz (University of Aberdeen)
On Place and Time: An Absent Method – A Creative-Critical Approach to Practicing Place

Neha Meena (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Narratives of Migration and Placemaking: Pakistani Hindu Settlements in Jodhpur, Rajasthan

1.00 Lunch

2.30 Panel 2: Contestations

Shurouq Ibrahim (Ohio State University)
Circular Hybridity: Reconciling Identity and Place in Randa Jarrar’s ‘A Map of Home’

Hanna Sophia Hörl (LMU Munich)
Contested Spatial Distributions and Creative Place-Making in Selected Projects by African American Artists Dread Scott and Theater Gates

Rosa Philipp (KU Eichstätt)
Understanding Territory as Practices of Resistance

Judith Keller (University of Heidelberg)
“Living this struggle and fighting this fight” – Testimonies in Geographical Research on the US Housing Crisis

4.30 Coffee

5.00 Panel 3: Imagining and Creating

Rémy Bocquillon (KU Eichstätt)
Thinking With Sounds: Spatial and Epistemic Configurations

Imen El Bedoui (University of Kairouan)
Toward an Immersive Aesthetic: Virtual Artistic Places as New Site of the Creative

Anthony Raynsford (San Jose State University)
Inventing “Ecotopia”: Experimental Urban Design in 1970s California

7.30 Conference Dinner (Gutmann)

Friday, 11th November 2022

9.00 Welcome coffee

9.15 Antje Kley (Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): Disruptions in Place and Time in Contemporary US-American Narratives of the End of Life

10.45 Coffee Break

11.00 Panel 4: Productions and Reproductions

Sheila Brannigan (NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lisbon)
The Deferred Gaze and Representations of Unfulfilled Dreams in Christina Fernandez’s Photographic Series Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d, 1996-2000, and Lavanderia, 2002

Anthony Obst (FU Berlin)
Practicing Democratic Place: The Domestic Workers’ Union in Richard Wright’s ‘Black Hope’

Oğuz Kayır (Bilkent University)
Women In-Between: Mapping the Geopolitics of Diaspora in Women’s Cultural Production

Nele Sawallisch (University of Trier)
Laughing in and out of Place: The Comedy Stage as Practicing Place

1 pm Lunch

2.30 Panel 5: Constructing the City

Emma Patchett (University of Leeds)
When Moving through Places is Criminalised: Vulnerability, Harm and Public Space

Stefanie Wallbraun (University of Heidelberg)
On the Instrumentalization of Public Space by Armed (Counter-)Protests and the Effects on Political Participation

Aylin Güngor (University of Heidelberg)
Performing Race, Performing Place: Negotiating Blackness and the City in ‘Atlanta’

4.30 Wrap Up and Closing Remarks

Place has become a pivotal concept for understanding processes of social spatialization.  From phenomenological reflections on the importance of place in philosophy to various ethnographic studies of practicing place in the Humanities and Social Sciences, appreciation for the material-semiotic specificity of thinking place and researching places has become widespread. By focusing on concrete practices of place-making, such as mapping, tracing, locating, imagining, narrating, writing, walking, experiencing, and redefining, it may also be possible to consider more critically the existential as well as political practices of place-taking, which relate to the functions of bounding and binding of socialities and configurations of sense-making and meaning through processes of inclusion and exclusion. Understanding the various modalities of interplay between both might be an important step towards overcoming the conceptual obstacles caused by retaining artificial distinctions between thinking and doing.

As a journal focused on theoretically-informed empirical investigations of practices of social spatialization, Space and Culture has been at the forefront of many interdisciplinary debates surrounding practices of place-making and place-taking, since its inception 25 years ago. To celebrate this occasion, we are holding a conference in 2022 for which we are seeking contributions from all disciplines and perspectives that are focused on the dynamics of place-making and place-taking, either empirically or conceptually or both.

Please send an abstract of not more than 250 words to:

sac-conf@ku.de by 31. January 2022

This conference is supported by the journal Space and Culture in celebration of its 25th anniversary as well as the German Research Council funded Graduate Training Programme “Practicing Place: Socio-Cultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations”.

Note: This conference will happen as a hybrid format (on site / online).