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.
On December 7, 2023, Sabine N. Meyer from the University of Bonn will join for a guest lecture. Under the title “Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature,” she will talk about The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) and Black Indigenous Literature. Please find an abstract of her talk below. The lecture will be held on Zoom from 12 to 2 pm.
If you would like to join, please use this link: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/62362308168
Over the last two decades, Black Indigenous literature, that is, literary works written by authors who identify as Black Indigenous, has emerged as a prominent medium for the negotiation of Black Indigeneity and for carving out a space outside the racial order implemented by North American settler states since the 18th century. My talk sets out to explore negotiations of Black Indigenous identity and relationality in one of the most recent examples of Black Indigenous fiction, Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021). My close reading demonstrates that the novel, through theme and form, consequently thinks together Blackness and Indigeneity in both past and present and explores the possibilities of shared Black Indigenous futures. Throughout my analysis, I also emphasize why it is important for scholars to engage with Black Indigenous literary production: shedding light on the politics and methodological limits of Western epistemologies and advancing alternative ways of knowing and making known, Black Indigenous literature is useful for confronting the “impasse between Blackness and Indigeneity” (Cheryl Harris) that has come to dominate discourses on Blackness and Indigeneity inside and outside academia.
On November 29, Burcu Dogramaci (Art History, LMU) will join our group to teach a workshop in our offices. Under the title “Neighbourhoods, Streets, Houses: Exile History as Urban Art History,” she will discuss the issue of migration in relation to art history.
Our Fellows and Associates are welcome to join! Please get in touch with our coordinator to register!
We are delighted to announce that Hanjo Berressem (Cologne/Colorado Springs) will hold a guest lecture at “Practicing Place” that we organize in collaboration with the department for American Studies at the University of Munich:
Title: Concrete Ecology: Brutalist Architecture with Félix Guattari
Date: November 28
Time: 6 pm
You can download the poster for the lecture here.
The lecture will take place virtually. Please contact gk-practicingplace@ku.de if you would like to join!
We are delighted to announce that Bernard Geoghegan (Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences) will hold a guest lecture at “Practicing Place” on November 16:
Title: Poetics of Rendering: How Graphics Format Territories
Date: November 16
Time: 6 pm
The lecture will only be accessible through Zoom:
https://kuei.zoom.us/j/64048402969?pwd=NVF4SUozZ2RiMEE2RE1rQ0JhOUlqUT09
During his Mercator Fellowship at “Practicing Place”, renowned geographer Tim Cresswell (University of Edinburgh) will teach a workshop on the book he is currently writing. Our Fellows and Associates are welcome to join!
Please get in touch with our coordinator to register!
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.
On June 22, our Mercator Fellow Rob Shields will give a workshop for our fellows and associates. He will discuss with them one of his texts and give insights into his own research.
Please get in touch with our coordinator to register!
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
We will be joined on the 21st of July 2022 for a lunchtime guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky. Visiting us from the American Studies department at the University of Augsburg. The lecture will be held at KGA-304.
Narratives of Displacement and Place-Making: Notions of Diaspora in Indigenous literatures
‘Place’ is a central issue in Indigenous literatures and, as numerous Indigenous writers and scholars have highlighted, in Indigenous epistemologies, with communal and political practices, as Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, “reflective of the relationality of the local landscape” (2017, 3). The settler colonial politics of displacement and dispossession over the past centuries thus present a violent disruption of fundamental relations; land rights, accordingly, are crucial to contemporary struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in Canada and the United States, with ‘place’ inextricably interwoven with notions community, its history, its land relations, and its language.
But geographical displacements have also at times led to new land relations and community formations that did not erase memories of the community history and place connections so violently disrupted, but incorporated them into processes of renewed place-making. Some writers, for instance the Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez (2021), use the term ‘diaspora’ to account for community building away from but tied to ancestral lands. For many scholars, ‘diaspora’ is a term antithetical to Indigenous experiences and constellations (e.g., Clifford 1994; Coleman 2017); for others, it offers a potentially productive avenue to capture complexly interlinked processes of place-loss, place-experience, and place-making (e.g., McCall 2010).
In light of these debates, this talk will explore the potential and the limits of ‘diaspora’ in the work of Muscogee poet, musician, playwright, and memoirist Joy Harjo, the incumbent United States Poet Laureate. In her more recent work, Harjo pays increasing attention not only to Muscogee territory of her youth in Oklahoma – a constant in her poetic engagement with place for decades – but also to the lands in Alabama from which the Muscogee were expelled in the 1830s to be forcibly resettled in the ‘Indian Territory’ that was to become Oklahoma. This talk does not seek to make claims regarding the general valence of ‘diaspora’ in Indigenous contexts; rather, I am interested in how this specific poet’s work might help complicate notions of place-making and diaspora.
References:
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1994), pp. 302-338.
Coleman, Daniel. “Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space: Of Literalism and Abstraction.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2016), pp. 61-76.
McCall, Sophie. „Diasporas, Indigenous Sovereignties, and Metis Writing in Canada.” Canadian Literature, vol. 204 (2010), p. 121.
Perez, Craig Santos. Navigating Chamoru Poetry. University of Arizona Press, 2021.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done. Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
We cordially invite all interested to the workshop ‘Cultural Memory and Literature: Research in Dialogue’ that will be held at KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt on the 13th and 14th of July 2022. The session on July 14th will now be held online.
Organised by fellows Sabine Aretz, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Johanna Lederer, the program will consist of three roundtables with guest participants – Damla Özkan, GRK ‘Life Writing – Life Sciences’ Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Alisa Preusser, Universität Potsdam; and Chiona Hufnagel, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. There will also be a keynote lecture by Lea Espinoza Garrido, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, entitled ‘Post-9/11 Politics of Memory and Politics of Forgetting in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One‘.
To register your participation, please do so via email: sabine.aretz@ku.de
Program:
Wednesday 13/07/2022
Roundtable: 1 – 2 p.m (KAP017): Johanna Lederer and Alisa Preusser
Roundtable: 2.30 – 3.30 p.m (KAP017): Gustavo Gutierrez and Chiona Hufnagel
Keynote lecture: 4 – 5.30 p.m (KAP017): Lea Espinoza Garrido (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) ‘Post-9/11 Politics of Memory and Politics of Forgetting in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One‘
Thursday 14/07/2022
Roundtable: 1.30 – 2.30 p.m (ZOOM): Sabine Aretz and Damla Özkan
https://kuei.zoom.us/j/63255396394
-end-
We hope to see you there!
You can find the poster as a pdf here: PP-Workshop-Poster
*Please note the slight changes to the schedule*
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).
We will be joined on the 19th of May for a lecture from Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher, professor of Media and Cultural studies at the University of Mainz. The lecture is an open event from 18.30-19.30 at KGA-205.
You can also join via Zoom: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/64726594064?pwd=N2dXN0FsSjBqSzU2Vy9sR2RVV043Zz09
Meeting ID: 647 2659 4064
Passcode: 351201
‘Mediating Infrastructures. On the Materiality and Temporality of Socio-Technical Networks’
Infrastructures are regarded as the backbone of modern societies. They represent the state’s provision of public services and are a sign of increasing economic interdependence in the context of international trade relations. They circulate goods, people, animals, but also energy, water, waste and information, thus organizing the spatial and temporal transfer of a wide variety of entities. It is this performance of infrastructural systems that constitutes their medial quality. But what exactly does this quality consist of? From a media and cultural studies perspective, the talk explores the materiality and temporality of infrastructures and proposes three perspectives that are relevant for their mediality: the in/visibility of infrastructures, the scalings they accomplish between the global and the local, and their processuality.
Prof. Schabacher will then be leading an internal workshop on Friday the 20th of May, in Marktplatz 2, with open to fellows, faculty, and associated members.
Gabriele Schabacher is professor of media cultural studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and co-speaker of the Collaborative Research Center 1482 “Humandifferenzierung.” Her research focuses on media and cultural theory, media history of transport, mobility and infrastructures, cultural techniques of repair, digital regimes of surveillance, media history of seriality and theory of autobiography. Her recent publications include the volumes she co-edited on the cultures of repair (2018) and on the practices of workarounds (2017), and the articles “Time and Technology. The Temporalities of Care” (2021), and “Staged Wrecks. The Railroad Accident between Infrastructural Lessons and Amusement” (2019). Her new book on infrastructures, entitled Infrastruktur-Arbeit, will be published in June 2022.
Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp – Audio Walk Gusen (2007) leads users through three market towns in Upper Austria which during World War II were the sites of concentration camps. Mayer’s artistic sound collage succeeds to visualize a long supressed past in an individual listener’s mind, and establishes an intimate and reflective form of commemoration which leads to critical questioning of neglected or institutionalized practices of commemoration. My talk reflects on how Mayer succeeds to bridge the distance to this past and makes it relevant for us today, and explains in which way his artistic practice can act as a guideline for the creation of other memory works elsewhere – especially in places where most traces of the past were erased and where everyday life goes hand in hand with a will to remember a painful past which happened right there.
The event is going to be filmed and will be uploaded to our YouTube channel shortly after.
ZOOM: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/8535747861
We hold regular sessions for associated members to present their projects, receive feedback, and build connections across the GRK.
Our October study days remain on zoom.
Monday, October 11th 2021:
14 – 14.50 Charlotte Renda, University of Bielefeld, “Mapping Atmospheres”
14.50 – 15.40 Stefan Schmidt, University of Wuppertal, “Philosophical Topology and Design Theory”
Tuesday, October 12th 2021:
14 – 14.50 Julia Wiedemann, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, “Constructions of Englishness: Negotiating the Anglo-Saxon Past in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Historical Discourses”
14.50 – 15.40 Laura Otto, Goethe University Frankfurt, “Re-Shaping Coast-Reef-Relations: Sargasso Algae and the Riviera Maya in Mexico”
We hold regular sessions for associated members to present their projects, receive feedback, and build connections across the GRK.
Our inaugural study day will take place on zoom at the end of July 2021
Thursday, July 29th 2021:
13 – 13.50Maria Martinez Casas, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, “The Discourse of Pop-Rock in Spanish. A Corpus Linguistic Analysis: Patterns of Language Use and Local Authenticity”13.50 – 13.50 – 14.40 Basil Weisse, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Friday, July 30th 2021:
13 – 13.50 Christiane Hoth de Olano, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, “Practices, Knowledge, and Science in Southern Chile (1883 – 1939)”
13.50 – 14.40 Suraj Chaudhary, College of Wooster, “Rethinking Social Spaces in the Digital Age”
(10 minute break)
14.50 – 15.40 Nicole Anna Schneider, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
City-making and Migrants: Disempowered cities and historical conjuncture
This talk calls for a multiscalar perspective on migrants in city making processes to explicate the multifarous relations between migrants and cities beyond the historically and culturally constructed categories and divides of migration scholarship and public debates. It argues for the benefits of looking at the city-making dynamics of migrants through the lens of cities, which have lost their economic, political or cultural power. It proposes that once we shift our focus to urban regeneration processes and their dispossessive forces that create common conditions of displacement and precarity for urban residents, we might see migrants’ emplacement and commoning dynamics in urban politics, as well as the emerging landscapes of affect in these cities anew. Approaching to migrants and city-making in this way however, urges us to bring the concept of historical conjuncture at the center of our research.
Everyone is welcome to attend this talk; to receive the Zoom-Link, please send an email to: gk-practicingplace@ku.de
Americans in the 21st century inhabit a perpetual state of ruins – from abandoned factories and malls to toxic landscapes and the looming threat of climate ruins. Ruins, once symbols of the past, are now symbols of the future. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, Empire of Ruins discovers a changing pattern of meaning in the way ruins have been perceived and represented, from the 19th century to the present. Orvell explains why Americans at first yearned for the ruins of Europe and the Middle East, discovering gradually in the 19th century that the remains of Native American cultures were as ancient and mysterious as Egypt’s[…]
Everyone is welcome to attend this talk; to receive the Zoom-Link, please send an email to: gk-practicingplace@ku.de