Cfp: "Space and Place," Mansfield College, University of Oxford, September 14–16, 2011.

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” constructed a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; and 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 practioners 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
* 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. Situated 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

3. Contested spaces

* 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.
* 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
* 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 places

4. Representations of place and space

* Embodied/disembodied spaces
* Lived spaces and the architecture of identity
* Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
* Set design and the construction of space in film, television and theatre
* Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the creative arts
* Technology and developments in the representation of space including new media technologies and 3D technologies of viewing
* Future cities/futurology and space
* Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative arts
* Space in computer games

Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill; Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand
E-mail: shs@inter-disciplinary.net

Colette Balmain
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
London, United Kingdom
E-mail: cb@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: sp@inter-disciplinary.net.