Places And Spaces

Call For Papers – Imagining Spaces & Places

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IMAGINING SPACES / PLACES: An international interdisciplinary conference

24−26 August 2011, University of Helsinki, Finland

“You are not in a place; the place is in you” (Angelus Silesius)

Literature and art mediate our experiences of the spaces and places surrounding us as well as within us. In contemporary discussion we use, besides the old term ‘landscape’, other ‘scapes’ which reflect a new interest and new thinking with regard to spaces: we speak of cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and even memoryscapes, and their relationships to one another. The intertwining of what, of old, was called ‘macrocosm’ (nature and society) and ‘microcosm’ (body and mind) and the role various art forms and media play in articulating and negotiating these chiasmic encounters is the focal point of the Imagining spaces/places conference. How are the interfaces between ‘the place in you and you in the place’ depicted? How are these imagined and material landscapes gendered and sexualized?

The conference seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history, literature and gender studies. We welcome papers addressing issues of representing and creating spaces in literature, art or film, and emphasizing the gendered, emotional and political or ideological character of these cultural mediations and re-mediations.

Sessions and suggestions of possible approaches:

LANDSCAPES

  • landscapes as medium for political, religious, psychological themes
  • landscape as pictures vs. (nature) as process
  • man in landscape; space, place, genius loci as objective places or subjective experiences
  • borderlines between nature and culture/cultural landscape and wilderness

CITYSCAPES

  • urban spaces and urban people
  • city images and chronotopes
  • the idea of metropolis
  • gendered/utopist/political/public/private city

MINDSCAPES

  • invisible cities and erewhons: fantasies of places and spaces and their role in arts
  • allegories of mind
  • dreams and other alternatives to actual world(s)

BODYSCAPES

  • bodies and belongings
  • affective, material, represented bodies
  • postcolonial corporealities
  • bodies of knowledge

MEMORYSCAPES

  • sites of mediations of past, present, future
  • methods of memorializations: regimes, archives, museums
  • collective memory (nation and nation building) /private memory
  • missing past, negative heritage (palimpsest traditions), melancholia

Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 2011.

Go to abstract submission.

via CFP – Imagining Spaces & Places.

Aesth/Ethics in Environmental Change, transdisciplinary workshop, May 2010, Germany

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Aesth/Ethics in Environmental Change
Invitation to a transdisciplinary workshop about the aesthetics, ethics, art, religion and ecology of the environment

Arranged by the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment, Religious Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Biological Station of Hiddensee, University of Greifswald, Environmental Ethics, University of Greifswald

Hiddensee, 24-28 May 2010

Aesth/Ethics in Environmental Change is an international workshop joining ethics, arts, religion and science in an attempt to reach a combined and deeper insight in nature, landscape and its changes. We invite scholars from different disciplines to participate in this workshop on the beautiful island of Hiddensee!

The following questions will be addressed:

  • What does the perception and awareness of the environment and ourselves within it contribute to our understanding of and dealing with nature? How can arts widen our perception of nature?
  • How are aesthetics and ethics connected to each other in habitats, places and spaces? Can both be entangled into an integrated “aesth/ethics”? Can such a view be incorporated in the aims of nature conservation?
  • How and where to seek, find and express the Sacred in nature? How are worldviews, values, rituals, visons, belief systems and ideologies at work within the human ecology?
  • How can humans in general encounter an accelerating and expanding environmental (incl. climatic) change? How can they perceive, experience, reflect and adapt to it?
  • How can aesthetics, ethics, religion and ecology transcend contemporary political modes of environmental protection? How could they catalyze a truly transdisciplinary environmental science?

Schedule:

The workshop will alternate between lectures, seminaries, discussions, practical art work and excursions,and it will offer varying options to let the  island itself intervene. Scholars and postgraduate students from all faculties and regions around the world are welcome to attend the workshop, and we expect all to stay during the whole workshop. The numbers of participants is limited to 30 persons. The early bird catches the worm:

Please register as soon as possible, using the registration form at: http://www.hf.ntnu.no/relnateur/

Basic accommodation will be provided to every accepted participant.

Island of Hiddensee

The island of Hiddensee is situated west of the island of Ru:gen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. Hiddensee is about 19 km2 in size with around 1,100 inhabitants. The island is completely situated within the Nationalpark Vorpommersche Boddenku:ste. Its beautiful nature including shorelines and shallow water, coastal dunes, heathlands, coastal meadows, dry grasslands and forests, attracks not only tourists, but also biologists!

Keynote speakers:

  • Sigurd Bergmann, Religious Studies/Theology, Trondheim, Norway
  • Irmgard Blindow, Ecology, Hiddensee, Germany
  • Emily Brady, Geography, Edinburgh, UK
  • Forrest Clingerman, Theology, Ohio, USA
  • Celia Deane Drummond, Theology and Religious Studies, Chester, UK
  • Thomas Jaspert, LandArt artist, Bokel, Germany
  • Konrad Ott, Environmental Ethics, Greifswald, Germany
  • Thomas Potthast, Ethics in Science, Tu:bingen, Germany
  • George Steinmann, Artist, Bern, Switzerland
  • Heike Strelow, Curator, Writer and Art Historian, Frankfurt/M., Germany

Call for papers:

Oral presentations (15 min) and posters are invited on the conference theme.  Abstracts (no more than 200 words) should be sent by 15 February of 2010 by e-mail.

Sigurd Bergmann, prof. dr.theol.
Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
NO – 7491 Trondheim
NORWAY
Institutt for arkeologi og religionsvitenskap
Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet (NTNU)
NO – 7491 Trondheim
Phone:  +47-73 59 65 87, +47-73 91 97 07
Skype:  sigurdbergmann
Fax:    +47-73 59 14 64

http://www.ntnu.no/arv/english/staff/sb
http://www.hf.ntnu.no/relnateur/