The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London invites proposals for Radical Space, a conference to take place at the UEL Docklands Campus on Friday and Saturday, 18th and 19th October, 2013. We are pleased to announce that Deborah Dixon and Carl Lavery of Aberystwyth University have now been confirmed as keynote speakers. They will be joined by Dimitris Papodopoulos (University of Leicester) and the independent artist Joanna Rajkowska.
We are interested in presentations which address the problematics of space both as concept and as lived social reality, with a particular emphasis on the tension between spaces of control in the context of contemporary neoliberalism, spaces of resistance and the apocalyptic spaces which emerge from war, forced migration and the failures of consumer capitalism.
What are the politics of space in contemporary contexts? How can we re-think space beyond the public/private divide? How do spatial arts re-configure space and the way in which it is experienced? What new configurations of space may emerge from burgeoning forms of community? How do the theatres of contemporary war force a re-assessment of spatial concepts? Is it still possible for the notion of virtual space to function in opposition to the striated space of contemporary cities?
We would welcome proposals which take a novel approach to presentation, particularly those which include elements of performance or which make creative use of the spaces made available for the conference. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
Occupations and other resistant practices
Squatter communities and displacement camps
New theatres of war
Art in/of the street
Imagining extra-terrestrial space
Utopias and heterotopias
New imaginative architectures
Psychogeography in the 21st century
The space of the body and the body in space
Digital architectures and virtual space
Social networking as a new public sphere
Hacking, hacktivism and other digital spatial incursions
Cinema and post-urbanism
Cartography and performance
Class and social space
Music scenes and spaces of community/expression
The apocalyptic city
For further details, please refer to our website http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/?page_id=1155 . Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to either Debra Benita Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk) or Tony Sampson (sampson2@uel.ac.uk) on or before 15th April, 2013.
VIRALITY 