CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Space and Place Conference

4th Global Conference: Space and Place Monday 9th September - Thursday 12th September 2013 Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom Call for Presentations Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the "Other" constructing a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; while ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of reconstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices of space and place. We seek submissions from a range of disciplines including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy and politics and also actively encourage practitioners and non-academics with an interest in the topic to participate. We welcome traditional papers, preformed panels of papers, workshop proposals and other forms of performance - recognising that different disciplines express themselves in different mediums. Submissions are sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following: 1. Theorising Space and Place - Philosophies and space and place - Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life - Space and place as realms of becoming - Rhizomatics and/or postmodernist constructions of space as a "meshwork of paths" (Ingold: 2008) - The relationship between spatiality and temporality/space as a temporal-spatial event (Massey: 2005) - The language and semiotics of space and place 2.The situation and location of Identities - Gendered spaces including the tension between domestic and public spheres - Work spaces and hierarchies of power - Geographies and archaeologies of space including Orientalism and Occidentalism - Ethnic spaces/ethnicity and space - Disabled spaces/places - Queer places and spaces - Alterity and its relationship to the production of space and place - Spatialities in Rural areas of nature - Queer Ruralities - Dangerous Nature vs. Civilisation 3. The Contestation of Existing Spaces and Places - Contemporary local and global political insurgencies and the politics of occupation in urban spaces and places, including the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the London Riots and the incursion by M23 into the DRC. - The economic, political, social and cultural contestation of urban space and its effect upon the production of place - The politics and ideology of constructions and discourses of space and place including the construction of gated communities as a response to real/imagined terrorism, class politics, or ethnic and cultural heterogeneity. - The relationship between power, knowledge and the construction of place and space - Territorial wars, both real and imagined. - The relationship between the global and the local and their relationship to space and place - Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction of lived spaces - Space and place from colonisation to globalisation - Real and imagined maps/cartographies of place - Transnational and translocal spaces and places 4. Representations of place and space - Embodied/disembodied spaces - Lived spaces and the places of the architecture of identity - Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces - Set design the construction of space and the representation of place in film, television and theatre - Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the creative arts - Technology and developments in the representation of space and place including new media technologies and 3D technologies of viewing - Future cities/futurology and the future of urban space and place - Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative arts - The spaces and places of and within digital gaming and digital games 5. Networks of Mobility and the Relationship to Movement and Space - The spaces of flows - Mobility, movement, and their effects upon the production and ontology of space and place - Non-spaces and their relationship to mobility and movement - The space of Immobile mobiles (Urry, Castells) and their effects upon the nature of place - The places of mobility What to Send: 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 22nd March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 21st June 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords E-mails should be entitled: SP4 Abstract Submission Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend. Organising Chairs: Matt Melia: mjmeliasp3@gmail.com Rob Fisher: sp4@inter-disciplinary.net The conference is part of the 'Ethos' series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume. For further details of the conference, please visit: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/space-and-place/call-for-papers/