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
To conclude the first three years of research collaboration we would like to invite lecture proposals to our conference Practices of Imagination – Placings of Imaginaries, which is dedicated to an exploration of the situatedness, locality, placedness and site-specificity of practices of imagining and cultural imaginaries. Imagining is usually seen as something that individual subjects do on their own and that is located in the blackbox of the individual’s mind – secretive and placeless. The conceptual focus of our conference seeks to challenge this assumption, and encourages explorations of alternative approaches. Examining the notions of place and placelessness that imaginaries incite (in works such as The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, and Rob Shields’ Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity), we aim to look at practices of imagination as shared activities, foregrounding their connection to place-making practices (e.g. in storytelling, protesting, playing, designing, etc.). We invite contributions that reflect on practices of imagination from a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective, as materially bound routinized bodily performances which are simultaneously mental activities.
Daydreaming in the shower, designing a memorial site, betting on the outcome of a game, protesting for the dream of a carbon neutral society by not attending school on Fridays: (Re)Imagining affords a body to act in and together with a material world, is generally performed publicly and with others, made accountable and, therefore, observable, and is shaped by and shapes the culture that surrounds it. Imagining, therefore, seems to always be placed somewhere specifically rather than anywhere and to relate bodies to things and ideas as well as bodies to other bodies, ideas to other ideas, and things to other things. As a practice of its own as well as an integral and crucial part of many other practices, we ask, does not imagining have its subjects rather than the other way around?
Themes and topics for panels and presentations might include, but are not limited to:
We welcome individual and group presentations (such as panels, roundtables and other formats). Group presentations should not exceed 4 people per panel.
Call for posters: Posters offer the opportunity to present the most important aspect of a project, highlight specific research findings, and discuss work in progress. Authors are expected to present their poster during a poster session. A poster may cover any of the topics of the conference. Posters will be on display for the duration of the conference. Format: DIN A0 (841mm wide x 1189mm high)
The conference will take place on the 8th, 9th and 10th of February 2024, hosted by the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, in Eichstätt, Germany.
There will be a pre-conference dinner on the 7th of February in Eichstätt.
The conference language is English. We plan subsequent publication(s).
This is an in-person event.
Please submit, as a single document, abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short CV to conference_pp@ku.de by 31st of August 2023.
If you have any questions, please contact conference_pp@ku.de.
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.
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).