CfP: Mediterranean Encounters in the City (Deadline extended to 15 Nov 2010)
- Ort: University of Colorado – Boulder
- Beginn: 15.04.11
- Ende: 16.04.11
- Disziplinen: Literaturwissenschaft, Sprachwissenschaft, Medien-/Kulturwissenschaft, Weitere Teilbereiche
- Sprachen: Sprachenübergreifend
- Frist: 15.11.10
CALL FOR PAPERS: MEDITERRANEAN ENCOUNTERS IN THE CITY
EXTENDED DEADLINES: NOVEMBER 15, 2010.
The conference “Mediterranean Encounters in the City” will be held at the University of Colorado – Boulder on April 15-16, 2011.
This conference aims to document and analyze how the contemporary Mediterranean city manages and negotiates its identity as a result of recent reconfigurations in its cultural, religious, and social landscape. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have recast difference as a central trope of identification in urban settings, unleashing heated debates about cultural convergences and animating anxieties about an arguable clash of civilizations in modern cities. These emerging uncertainties have also grown stronger as the homogenizing forces of globalization unsettle essential principles of the nation-state and nationhood and render fixed perceptions of distinctive and singular people and cultures more tenuous. Recent scholarship and public discourse have accordingly framed discussions of these encounters around concerns of geo-political security and international policy; unfortunately, framed within these terms, our understanding of how various groups within the Mediterranean metropolis deal with the intensification of difference as a lived experience has remained regrettably thin.
This conference seeks to transcend this limitation and explore new, interdisciplinary research paradigms that will help us gain a comprehensive perspective on how complex macro and micro tensions, contradictions and similarities are negotiated in building urban identities in the Mediterranean basin.
Given the large social and cultural transformations wrought by steady waves of migration and a historical geographic predisposition to new cultural interactions and encounters, we seek to account and analyze competing narratives of the Mediterranean today through the reconfiguration of its cities. Much of the debate on the Mediterranean today has focused on a single and holistic conception of culture (i.e., Mediterranean borders as porous, the Mediterranean basin as locus of cultural exchange, Mediterranean cultures as more receptive of difference). This conference looks to inquire whether this vision of Mediterranean culture is as definite and rooted in today’s urban environments.
Proposals on the following topics are particularly welcome:
=> What constitutes the Mediterranean city? What are some of its contemporary defining characteristics? Is there a new Mediterranean urban order as cities are re-inscribed in a new space of modernity?
=> How are Mediterranean cities re-imagined as mediated articulations of place beyond the binary of the foreign and the indigenous?
=> How do various mediations of the Mediterranean city through film, television, music, literature, architecture, etc. reflect patterns of broad historical, social and cultural change?
=> In what ways does the Mediterranean city act as a stage for the articulation of urban identities?
=> Does the Mediterranean basin today act as a medium for communication between Mediterranean cities? Will the recent re-emergence of cultural and religious pluralism in the area lead to new competing visions for a transnational collective identity?
=> How do individual/local Mediterranean identities compare to collective national notions of cultural and social belonging?
=> The impact of new media and virtual representations on the construction of the Mediterranean urban identity.
=> Methodologies: how to study the Mediterranean city in the age of globalization? How can academic interdisciplinarity help us document and analyze the constant mutations and articulations of the Mediterranean city?
Please send a 300-word abstract along with a short biographical note by November 15, 2010 to
Michela Ardizzoni, Dept. of French and Italian, University of Colorado – Boulder: michela.ardizzoni@colorado.edu
Confirmed plenary speakers include:
=> Dr. Franco Cassano, professor of sociology at the university of Bari (Italy) and author of the groundbreaking book Il pensiero meridiano on Southern identities and the relationship between North and South in the age of modernity.
=> Dr. Lila Leontidou, professor of geography and European culture at the Hellenic Open University (Greece) and author of The Mediterranean City in Transition, a study of the spatial practices of Mediterranean urban popular classes in the 20th century.
Michela Ardizzoni, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of French and Italian
University of Colorado at Boulder
Woodbury 407
UCB 238
Boulder, CO 80309-0238
Ph. 303-735-3562
Fax: 303-492-8338
Email: michela.ardizzoni@colorado.edu
Website: www.michelaardizzoni.com
Publiziert von: Barbara Ventarola