Events

25 – 27 June 2025 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.

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Main Venue (June 26-27) Kapuzinerkloster (KAP), room 209 Kapuzinergasse 2 85072 Eichstätt

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Wednesday, 25 June 2025: Pre-Conference Programme 

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16:30-18:00 Walking Tour, meeting point: Domplatz 8

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19.00 Pre-Conference Dinner

Dom Cafe: https://www.eichstaett.de/gastronomie/dom_cafe-47/

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Thursday, 26 June 2025: Conference Day 1 (KAP 209)

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8:30-9:00 Registration

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9:00-9:30 Welcome Coffee and Opening Remarks by Jessie Martin and Nikita Sazonov

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9.30-11:00 Keynote 1: Rumya Putcha (Univ. of Georgia): Ecologies of Yoga: Somatic Orientalism and Imaginations of India

Chair: Ulla Stackmann

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11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

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11.30-13:00 Panel 1: UN_BELONGING

Chair: Sarah Earnshaw

Bitari Wissam (FLHS, Cadi Ayyad Univ.-Marrakech-Morocco): Displacement as Home in Arab Women’s Writings

Madhav Dubey (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee): Disrupting Place Attachment and Navigating Geotrauma in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Jakob Bierwagen (Catholic Univ. Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): Beyond “Paradise” – Making Place for Politics within Brandenburgian Reception Facilities

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13:00-14:30 Lunch Break

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14:30-16:00 Panel 2: UN_IDENTIFYING

Chair: Franziska Imhoff

Kamelia Sofia El Ghaddar (Univ. of Bologna): Undoing Arabness: Deterritorialisation and Displacement in Alya Mooro and Salma El Wardany’s Novels

Luis Peña (Univ. of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): Unveiling Everyday Spatial Practices: A Methodological and Empirical Inquiry into Surveillance, Conflict, and Place-Making

Meena Venkataramanan (Brown Univ.): “That Indian Fellar”: Indianness as Specter in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.

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16:00-16:30 Coffee Break

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16:30-18:00 Panel 3: UN_HUMAN

Chair: Natalia del Carmen Eduardo

Jana Wieser (Univ. of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): Hairscapes: Haircutting as a Territorial(ising) Practice

Lucy Rogers (Univ. of Westminster): The Arctic as a Contested Place of Myth in Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s ‘Memoryscapes’

Rania Elshabassy (Cairo Univ.): The Sea as an Agent of Transformation: Undoing Emplacement through Water in selected Arab Women’s Fiction

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19.30 Conference Dinner

Gutmann: http://www.gutmann-eichstaett.de/

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Friday, 27 June 2025: Conference Day 2 (KAP 209)

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9:30-10.00 Welcome Coffee

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10:00-11:50 Panel 4: UN_STRUCTURING

Chair: Nikita Sazonov

Juliana Yat Shun, Kei (Liverpool School of Architecture):“Where are you from?” Structures of Urban Ex-Porting

Mingyue Li (Free Univ. Berlin): Protest as Spatial Agency: Civil Autonomy and the (Un)Doing of Extractivism in Europe

Feliciana Chiaradia (Univ. of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): Resilient (Form of) R-Existence: Placing and Displacing Remembrance

Ayşegül Boyalı (Sakarya Univ.): Contesting the Public Green: Undoing Neoliberal Urban Greening Through Everyday Practices of Resistance

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12.00-13.30 Lunch Break

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13.30-15:20 Practitioners Panel 5: UN_IMAGINING

Chair: Jessie Martin

Emma Patchett (Northumbria Univ.): “No more time, No More Places”: (Un) Making Utopia in Law and Literature

Shanyn Fiske (Rutgers Univ.), Kat Hash, Kaja Brix: Fragments from the Filmmakers’ Manifesto

Daria Syvakos (Berlin Univ. of the Arts) and Wren Bisley (Berlin Univ. of the Arts): (Un)doing Belonging: A Dialogic Performance on Practices of Displacement

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15:20-15:35 Wrap up and Closing Remarks by Gabriela Randig and Leonie Unkel

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Our faculty member Christian Steiner is organising a conference on wine and its global entanglements. For this purpose, he is collaborating with colleagues from Würzburg, Jena, and Leipzig.

More information will follow soon and can be found here:

https://www.ku.de/die-ku/fakultaeten/mgf/geographie/aktuelles/termine/tagung-wine-place-space

 

 

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.

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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

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

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17.00 Informal Get-Together / Registration

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

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20.00 Pre-Conference Dinner

Ristorante Tartufo

Marktplatz 22, 85072 Eichstätt

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

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8.30 Welcome Coffee and Opening Remarks

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

“Situating Knowledge, Emplacing Imagination”

Chair: Sarah Earnshaw

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10.30 Practitioners Panel 1: Eva Stotz

“Life as raw material”

Chair: Shruti Malik

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12.00 Lunch and Poster Session

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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”

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16.00 Coffee Break

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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”

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20.00 Conference Dinner

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

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

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9.30 Welcome Coffee

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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’”

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12.00 Lunch

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14.00 Practitioners Panel 2: Frog Design Studio

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

Chair: Shruti Malik

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15.30 Coffee Break

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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”

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17.15 Coffee Break

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

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

Chair: David Kempf

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20.00 Conference Dinner

Gasthof Krone
Domplatz 3, 85072 Eichstätt

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

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9.00 Welcome Coffee

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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”

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11.00 Closing Remarks and Wrap Up

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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.

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.

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Wednesday, 9 November 2022

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Pre-conference Programme

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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)

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Thursday, 10 November 2022

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9.00 Welcome coffee and opening remarks

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9.30 Tim Cresswell (University of Edinburgh): On Routes

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11.00 Coffee Break

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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

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1.00 Lunch

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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

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4.30 Coffee

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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

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7.30 Conference Dinner (Gutmann)

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Friday, 11th November 2022

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9.00 Welcome coffee

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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

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10.45 Coffee Break

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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

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1 pm Lunch

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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’

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4.30 Wrap Up and Closing Remarks

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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).