[csaa-forum] Fwd: Conf: radical spatiality in our times, September 1 – 4, 2011, Zadar, Croatia

TANIA Lewis tania.lewis at rmit.edu.au
Tue Jan 25 13:25:11 CST 2011


FYI all
I attended last year's Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Sciences
conference in Zadar and had a great time. The keynote for this year's
conference is Edward Soja.
Cheers
Tania
 
International Conference Announcement and Call for Papers 
Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Sciences 2
The Zone and Zones - Radical Spatiality in our Times 

Recent works throughout the fields of literary and cultural studies,
sociology, political 
science, anthropology, human geography, history, film and art history,
to name 
just the most prominent, have chosen research agendas which reflect a
spatial 
orientation, one which testifies to the (re)emergence of space as being
of 
immense significance to the understanding of the phenomenon of our
world. This 
interest is reflected in diverse conceptual perspectives: heterotopia,
rhizome, 
Third space, hyperreal, time-space compression, placelessness,
non-place, 
contact-zone…. For some there has been too much spatialization which
even 
heralds the end of temporality, including various ends of everything
(from the 
end of history and art to the end of any stable identities). In the end
one 
wonders is there anything left outside of space - or, rather is there
anything 
left in the space that can gesture towards different alternatives, 
alterities...? 

Drawing on Brian McHale's concept of zone we would like to discuss
these 
questions on possible spatial alternatives and alterities. The zone
originates 
in a new hellish simultaneity of WW1 and technological explosions
bringing 
different, incoherent entities in a new, surrealistic proximity, like 
Appolinieare's zones, where different parts of Paris intermingle with
different 
parts of the world. McHale expands the notion of zones to postmodern
fiction, as 
compendiums of parallel unrealized worlds, parallaxes, places of
haunting, 
whirlpools of consumption and so on. All of these zones signal, more or
less, a 
kind of ontological insecurity encapsulated in Foucault's term
heterotopia - 
“the impossible space in which fragments of disparate discursive
orders are 
merely juxtaposed, without any attempt to reduce them to a common
order”. We 
propose to expand McHale's reading of the postmodern experience and
different 
zones by exploring various concepts of space – such as the hyperreal,
the rhizomatic, the 
symptom and extimacy, non-places, Third space ... and so on. Therefore,
we 
picture the conference exploring various ZONES and traversing a variety
of 
theoretical concepts, bringing together scholars of diverse backgrounds
and 
interests. 

Possible topics include: 
The zone as a specific locality (local/global, suburbs as zones,
tourist 
zones...) 

The zone as a supplement to „the Whole‟ (world system, urban space...)

The war zones, urban zones, the zones-within-zones, private zones
(private 
matrixes, virtual worlds…) 

The zone as a non-place (shopping malls, airports, motorways...) 
The military zones (ghettos, occupied territories, frontiers,
borders...) 
Concentration camps and asylum centers (the zone as spatialised state
of 
exception) 

Gothic and fantastic spaces/zones 
Contact-zones (museums, borderlands... ) 
 
Radical zone as Third space, created and populated by the marginalized

The zone as a symptom (the zone may be viewed as a particular spatial
entity 
that subverts its broader foundation, its own genius...) 

The Zone as the site of political struggle 
Zones and the construction of identity 
The history of spaces/zones 
Virtual zones (games...) 
Etc. 

The conference will take place from September 1 – 4, 2011 at the
University of 
Zadar, Zadar, Croatia 

Keynote speaker: 
Professor Edward Soja, University of California, Los Angeles 
Proposals are invited from scholars from different fields and
disciplines of 
humanities and social sciences for individual papers (30 minutes
including 
discussion time). 

Please send proposals (no more than 300 words in length) to 
rhss.conference at gmail.com by June 1st 2010. Selected conference papers
will be 
published.




      



Dr Tania Lewis
Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow
School of Media & Communication
RMIT University
Building 36.3.3 City Campus
GPO Box 2476, Melbourne VIC 3001
Australia

ph: +61 3 9925 2406
fax: +61 3 9639 1685
email: tania.lewis at rmit.edu.au

web: www.rmit.edu.au/staff/tania-lewis







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