CALL FOR PAPERS

The aim of this symposium is to take advantage of our Asia-Pacific location by raising questions about gender and reality TV from a comparative, cross-cultural perspective. We are particularly interested in critical investigations of the intersections between gender, culture and place as engineered by reality television. While papers addressing reality television and gender from an international perspective are most welcome, we hope to maintain a critical focus on cultural specificity and the social geographies of gender, including the expressions and negotiations of indigenous, minoritarian, national and transnational cultures.

We invite papers on any aspect of gender, culture and reality TV, including the following topics:

• Culturally and/or nationally specific articulations of masculine or feminine identity in Reality TV
• The reconfiguration of gender-focused international formats within non-Western cultural contexts
• Gender, Reality TV and transnational flows of capital, culture and consumption
• Gendered identities within colonial/post-colonial/settlement narratives or histories
• The place of gender within a multiple modernities approach to Reality TV
• Gender, Reality TV and multiculturalism/biculturalism/mixed cultures
• Intersections of gender, race and/or ethnicity in Reality TV
• The relations between gender and individualised selfhood on Reality TV
• Reality TV as a site of gender performance and/or transformation
• Family and gender politics within Reality TV
• Sexual cultures and gender on Reality TV
• Gender, Reality TV and cultures of fandom and celebrity
• (Anti) heteronormative practices in reality programming
• Reality TV, gender and hierarchies of cultural value

Please submit a 300-word abstract & short biographical note to:

a.west@auckland.ac.nz
&
m.kavka@auckland.ac.nz

by 29 July, 2011.

Successful applicants will be notified by 19 August, 2011.

Performing Places
Convenor: Katharine Willis

“The space of the city is not a static reality defined by built forms or demographic facts, but is instead a form of spatial practice created by the interweaving of everyday actions and interactions of its citizens. These interactions are no longer confined to face-to face contact, as communications media have re-arranged many social environments so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways. Walls, doors, gates and distances still frame and isolate encounters, but new technologies have increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings. This session will look at how thinking about places as performative opens up new possibilities for both understanding and reacting to the potentials for communications technologies in space.

Networked space
The media theorist Castells has popularized the concept of the ‘space of flows’; where space is understood as linking up electronically separate locations in an interactive networks that connects activities and people in distinct geographical contexts. He contrasts this with the traditional concept of the ‘space of places’; which he defines as organizing experiences and activity around the confines of locality. One of the social consequences of such networked space is that that multiple social realities can occur in one place. The same physical space may be caught within the domain of two different social occasions. The social situations that occur in these overlapping behaviour settings support gatherings that possess a special characteristic in that they exist on more than one social level. For example, presence in public space and interaction has traditionally been equated with face-to-face contact. Yet, presence in public space as mediated by new technologies has a different type of aesthetic, no longer dominated by visual access but by informational access. The features and structure of the interaction is enabled by a connection, which is not necessarily achieved through physical movement from one location to another. As such, everyday actions and behaviours no longer belong to particular places, and are now multiplexed and overlaid; there now exists the possibility to switch rapidly from one activity to another while remaining in the same place, so we end up using the same place in many different ways. On one hand this gives rise to confusion, and ambiguous and contested zones emerge, where the multiple and overlapping behaviours created create disparate, fragmented and discontinuous spatial references. On the other hand we can consider space as a field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements it is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it (de Certeau 1984, 117). In this case space is performed so that, rather than being inhabited as an intransitive bounded entity, it is experienced as a far more fluid event-based space that comes into existence only through the social actions of those present.

Performative space
In this session we will investigate the social effects of communications media on how space is inhabited and acted upon. We will explore the relevance of concepts such as neighbourhood, community and territory in times when cities become essentially transitory social spaces for many of those who experience them. In particular we will focus on the performative nature of space.”

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions) by March 15th 2010.

Guest Editors: Dr. Gregory Seigworth, Millersville University, USA, e-mail: gregory.seigworth@millersville.edu.

Dr. Michael E. Gardiner, University of Western Ontario, Canada, e-mail: megardin@uwo.ca.

Space and Culture invites papers for a special issue on Henri Lefebvre and the ‘next world order’.

In this first decade of the 21st Century our world has grown remarkably disordered. How are we to make sense of it, and to find some horizon for hope, at the very intersection of such global-militarist calamities, fatalistic neoliberal fantasies, cyber- & postgenomic vanities, all of these innumerable everyday oscillations of the spectacular and the mundane? The heterodox (and heretical) French thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) might offer a way (or ways) to conjure some sense of order (pointing toward a next world) from amidst the upheavals of a 21st Century already in disarray. Spanning some sixty years, Lefebvre’s voluminous and challenging writings touch on virtually every topic that remains crucial to the contemporary concerns of critical socio-cultural inquiry, including historiography, everyday life, space, social change and ‘micropolitics’, the state, urbanization, and utopia, to name only the most salient.

Despite his status as (in the words of Fredric Jameson) ‘the last great classic philosopher’, with the partial exception of his writings on urbanism and spatiality, for a lengthy period Lefebvre’s ideas were greatly neglected in the English-speaking world, at least outside broad historical surveys of post-war French political and social thought. One could speculate that it may be because – although his work anticipated certain aspects of postmodernist and poststructuralist thought, without succumbing to many of their excesses and non sequiturs – Lefebvre remained committed to critical Marxism and the utopian project of ‘changing life’. More surprisingly, however, was the waning interest in Lefebvre within France itself as the 20th Century drew to a close. Astonishingly, by the time of his death in 1991, none of Lefebvre’s books were in print in his native land. But the last decade has witnessed a remarkable reversal of this situation.

This special issue of Space and Culture will concern itself primarily with two key aspects of Lefebvrean thought: The first would be to engage his ideas with a variety of current theoretical currents and developments; second, to extend his thought into the analysis of particular aspects of sociocultural life in our contemporary, and increasingly globalised world, including appropriations of Lefebvrean categories and concepts in areas of intellectual production on the ostensive margins of the Western metropole.  This may include public interventions, non-traditional submissions and visual or multi-media pieces for inclusion on our website www.spaceandculture.org.  Lefebvre’s work on the colonization of space and the natural world in particular challenges prevailing orthodoxies vis-a-vis globalization. What vital tools has Henri Lefebvre left us that might provide us critical insights for confronting the demons that haunt our new century?

Papers must be in English. See our submission guidelines or  our Sage Publications site for instructions for authors and details about the journal’s house style.  The deadline for submitting papers is 1 April 2010. Send an electronic copy as Word 6.0 attachment via email to space@ntu.ac.uk.   All submitted papers will be evaluated by the Editors, and publication decisions will be based on the double-blind peer-review process (the Editors will necessarily know the identities of all participants). The Editors are happy to receive inquiries about the issue via email.

Space and Culture is a peer-reviewed, quarterly interdisciplinary journal published by Sage. It fosters the publication of reflections on a wide range of sociospatial arenas such as the home, the built environment, architecture, urbanism, and geopolitics. It covers sociology, in particular, qualitative sociology and contemporary ethnography; communications, in particular, media studies and the Internet; cultural studies; urban studies; urban and human geography; architecture; anthropology; and consumer research.

With support from the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs and The Ohio State University, we are organizing the Communicative Cities: Integrating Technology and Place Conference. The Urban Communication Foundation began exploring this topic about three years ago and held planning sessions in Washington, DC, Rome, and Paris.

We invite planners, designers, city officials, policy-makers, communications professionals and others to submit proposals for presentations.

Join us in Columbus, Ohio June 25-26, 2009. The conference will have a distinguished set of keynote speakers. The theme: “Communicative Cities” encompasses a variety of areas (design, public policy, journalism) across different scales and settings (downtowns, city/regional, global), and seeks to address questions such as:

• What makes a communicative city?
• How do cities facilitate communication?
• How can technology and face-to-face communication be integrated in a global world?
• What are the challenges from the exponential rise in communication technology?
• What are the potential impacts on place and community?
• How can global connectivity and data accessibility be achieved?

The submission Abstract proposal DEADLINE is January 20, 2009. We will notify you by March 15 if your presentation is accepted.

We welcome three kinds of presentations: Traditional papers; Presentations of designs or plans; Symposium on a single topic with 3-4 presenters and a moderator. Awards will be given for the best student paper and best student design or plan.

Jack L. Nasar, & Kate Terzano, co-chairs Communicative Cities, The Ohio State University

On-line submittal

- Anne

Mark Jackson (U of Bristol) has alerted me to a terrific-sounding session on the theme of air and materialities to be held at the 2009 meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Las Vegas.

CFP: ‘Aerographies’: re-thinking unthought elemental and metaphysical assumptions in recent human geographies
AAG 2009, Las Vegas, March 22nd-27th.

“…our concepts have been formed on the model of solids.” (H. Bergson)

“Metaphysics always supposes, in some manner, a solid crust from which to raise a construction.” (L. Irigaray)

The most vital of geography’s concerns are those that materiality opens in thinking the connections between earth and life (Whatmore 2006). The return to materialist concerns in recent cultural, social and political geographies reflects this vitality. Geographies of affect, emotion, performance and performativity, mobilities, non-representation, science and technology, corporeality, everyday life, representation and vision, memory, networks and assemblages, complexity, etc… all premise their engagements through specificities of the material, whose complex, relational dynamics “en-world” us in multiple ways. Yet, while engaged material practices are said to open relational thinking in dynamic ways, “matter”, and what we mean by the term itself, remains under considered. This has implications, for the objects we think with shape our metaphysical and ontological presumptions. As such, how we engage what we mean by matter is shaped by the objects we mobilize and the empirical sites we refract.

As Irigaray and Bergson argue, we moderns privilege “the solid crust” to give our thought shape. But what if Being and thought are not of the same matter? What if we began with the non-solid? What if we began, /in medias res/, as Irigaray insists we must, with air? Is air the forgotten material mediation of our geographical logos?

We are interested to deepen and extend recent efforts to re-think the geographies of material relation (ex. Ingold, 2008; Olwig, 2008), by interrogating the elemental assumptions behind how we engage the conceptual and practical spaces of matter and relation. In particular, we are interested to engage air as an evocative “object” for thinking relational and experiential space. Would beginning with the most ephemeral, and yet the constitutively most important element for life, enable us to reflect relational interaction in exciting and ever more relevant ways? Can ‘thinking with air’ respond with rigor, innovation, and responsibility to contemporary geographical imperatives ? Can it do so within registers perhaps under recognized in our present earth-writing? Can air be an evocative object for extending geographical engagements with relational materiality and space?

Deadline for abstracts: Oct. 10th, 2008
Reply via email with abstract to: <m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk>
Organisers: Mark Jackson, Maria Fannin, J-D Dewsbury – U of Bristol.

~ Matthew

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

Possible topic areas include: Privacy, Security, and Dataveillance // Social Space // Environment // Advocacy

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 27, 2008

**

Conflux 2008
The art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.

Participants in Conflux share an interest in psychogeography. Projects range from interpretations of the classical approach developed by the Situationists to emerging artistic, conceptual, and technology-based practices. At Conflux, participants, along with attendees and the public, put these investigations into action on the city streets. The city becomes a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities. Only events that take place in the New York City area are eligible. They may be outdoors or in a venue you provide.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 31, 2008

- Anne