07.02.24 – 10.02.24 Conference

Practices of Imagination – Placings of Imaginaries

7th – 10th February 2024 Eichstätt, Germany

Please find our Call for Papers here. If you would like to attend the conference in person, please get in touch with us via gk-practicingplace@ku.de.  We will publish more information about remote access in the upcoming weeks.


Main Venue (Feb. 8-10)

Bischöfliches Seminar

St. Willibald, Eichstätt KdöR

Leonrodplatz 3

85072 Eichstätt

 

Venue Pre-Conference Programme

Kapuzinerkloster (KAP), room 209

Kapuzinergasse 2

85072 Eichstätt

 



Wednesday, 7 February 2024: Pre-conference Programme (KAP 209)


17.00 Informal Get-Together / Registration


18.00 Film Screening Sollbruchstelle/Devil Hides in Doubt  with Director Eva Stotz


20.00 Pre-Conference Dinner

Ristorante Tartufo

Marktplatz 22, 85072 Eichstätt


Thursday, 8 February 2024: Conference Day 1 (Bischöfliches Seminar)


8.30 Welcome Coffee and Opening Remarks


9.00 Keynote 1: Helen Hester (London School of Film, Media and Design)

“Situating Knowledge, Emplacing Imagination”

Chair: Sarah Earnshaw


10.30 Practitioners Panel 1: Eva Stotz

“Life as raw material”

Chair: Shruti Malik


12.00 Lunch and Poster Session


14.00 Panel 1: Political Imaginations

Chair: Moritz Wischert-Zielke

Norma Musih (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
“On Three Practices for Training a Political Imagination in Palestine-Israel”

Ece Canlı (University of Minho)
“Dreams Unwalled: Prison Abolitionism as a Radical Practice of Collective Reimagination”

Philipp Sperner (University of Munich)
“Window of Opportunity: Vinod Kumar Shukla and the Social Imaginary as a Practice of Spatialization”

Nicole Schneider (University of Munich)
“Re-Imagining the Location of Publics”


16.00 Coffee Break


16.15 Panel 2: Precarity and Power

Chair: Fabian Ebeling

Niklas Pernhaupt (University of Vienna)
“A community imagines – Exploring the imagination of a better work environment among Austrian junior researchers”

Khushboo Jain (FAU Erlangen)
“Reimagining Home”

Sarah Earnshaw (University of Eichstätt)
“Drawing the (Picket) Line – Placing Cultural (Workers) Protest Imaginaries”

Christiane Hoth de Olano (University of Eichstätt)
“Frontier Images: Practices of Knowledge Production on Native Medicinal Plants and the Believe in Miraculous Remedies”


20.00 Conference Dinner

Zum Gutmann, Wirtshaus & Kleinkunst
Am Graben 36, 85072 Eichstätt


 

Friday, 9 February 2024: Conference Day 2 (Bischöfliches Seminar)


9.30 Welcome Coffee


10.00 Panel 3: Fiction and Its Imaginations

Chair: Gustavo Adolfo Gutierrez Hernandez

Oluwole Coker (Obafemi Awolowo University)
“Towards the Reimagination of Futures in Nigeria Diaspora Science Fiction”

Anja Heron Lind (TU Dresden)
“Irigaray and SF: Spatialising Sexual Difference in the Teixcalaan Duology”

Can Aydın (TU Dresden)
“‘Being Found’ in Cyberwilderness in Jonny Appleseed

Johanna Lederer (University of Eichstätt)
“Imagining Places through Indigenous Futurist Comics: Chelsea Vowel’s ‘kitaskînaw 2350’”


12.00 Lunch


14.00 Practitioners Panel 2: Frog Design Studio

“Love 2075: Building archetypes of romantic love using speculative design framework”

Chair: Shruti Malik


15.30 Coffee Break


15.45 Panel 4: Urban Studies and Architecture

Chair: Jessica Balling

Iuliana Gavril (Norwich University of the Arts)
“Tracing Out the Ireal Real Estate: From Real Objects to Dream Houses”

Seyedeh Zhaleh Abbasi Hosseini (University of Brussels)
“Echoes of Tehran: Navigating Urban Imaginaries in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Elisabeth Sommerlad (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz)
“Reimagine Nature for the Future: Practices of (Re-)Imagining and (Re-)Placing Nature in Dubai and Mauritius”


17.15 Coffee Break


17.30 Keynote 2: Hannes Krämer (University of Duisburg-Essen)

“The Borders of Tomorrow. Imagining the Futures of Europe’s Margins”

Chair: David Kempf


20.00 Conference Dinner

Gasthof Krone
Domplatz 3, 85072 Eichstätt


 

Saturday, 10 February 2024: Conference Day 3 (Bischöfliches Seminar)


9.00 Welcome Coffee


9.30 Panel 5: Exercises in Imagining

Chair: Sabine Aretz

Nathalia Lavigne (University of São Paulo)
“An imaginary in metamorphosis: From André Mauraux’s Museum Without Walls to a collaborative understanding about museums in the digital sphere”

Sofia Pedrini (Ruhr University Bochum)
“On the cultural constraints of thought experiments”

David Kempf (University of Eichstätt)
“Placing the Translation from Implicit to Explicit: Arenas, Psychoanalysis and Ocean Voyages”


11.00 Closing Remarks and Wrap Up


 

29.06.23 Conference

Symposium: Rethink and Reload – Monuments in 21st Century Democracies between Iconoclasm and Revival

Our faculty member Nathalie Aghoro participates in the symposium “Rethink and Reload” that will take place in in Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin from June 29 to June 30.

Together with Dr Urte Evert (Director of Zitadelle Spandau), Tanja Schult has organized the symposium. It is the first output of the research project Rethink and Reload – Monuments in 21st Century Democracies between Iconoclasm and Revival, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which Tanja Schult is conducting together with Professor Tim Cole (Bristol).

Find out more here.

17.11.22 – 19.11.22 Conference

Playing the Field III: Video Game Ecologies and American Studies

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

09.11.22 – 11.11.22 Conference

‘Here, There, and Somewhere in Between: Placing, Practicing, Configuring’ Mid-term Conference

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


 

Logo of graduate school "Practicing Place"

23.06.22 – 25.06.22 Conference

Taking Place and Making Place: Celebrating 25 Years of Space and Culture

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).