[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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