[Kaupunkitutkimus] Fwd: Reminder: cfp deadline for literary urban studies conference "(Im)Possible Cities" 31.3.

[Sampo Ruoppila]

Moi! Laittakaahan kaikki muutkin tietoonne tulevia ja mahdollisesti
laajemmin kiinnostavia konferensseja ja muita tapahtumia listalle tiedoksi.
Sampo

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Lieven Ameel <Lieven.Ameel at staff.uta.fi>
Date: ma 3. huhtikuuta 2017 klo 13.20
Subject: Reminder: cfp deadline for literary urban studies conference
"(Im)Possible Cities" 31.3.
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Dear all,


This is a reminder that the deadline for the call for papers of our
literary urban studies conference "(Im)Possible Cities" is approaching.
Information below and on the website of our conference:


*Call for Papers / (Im)Possible Cities*

The First International Conference of the Association for Literary Urban
Studies

23–24 August 2017, University of Tampere, Finland

http://www.uta.fi/ltl/en/impossiblecities2017/cfp.html


Keynote speakers: dr. Ayona Datta (King’s College London) and prof. Eric
Prieto (University of California, Santa Barbara).


The conference will be devoted to the theme of possible and impossible
cities, the links between them, and the complex relationships between city
imaginaries and real-world cities. This topic acknowledges the debt that
literary cities owe to real-life city plans, and the similar debt that
visions of urban development owe to the imaginary scenarios put forth in
fictional narratives. The conference theme straddles a variety of fields,
including literary urban studies, urban planning theory, cultural
geography, and future studies.


In the sense that cities are sites for envisioning the future, questions of
possibility and potentiality have always been prominent in urban theory. In
the last sixty years, such queries have often taken the form of re-imagined
political geographies and approaches to what constitutes ‘the good city’,
including Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of the ‘right to the city’ and ‘the
urban revolution’, David Harvey’s ‘spaces of hope’, and Jane Jacobs’s call
for cities to build on their community assets. But utopian features in
imaginations of the city (from Plato onwards), as well as fantastic
elements in even the most realistic city literature (in Victor Hugo’s
Paris, for example) have not only drawn attention to what life can learn
from literature, they have also problematized the relationship between
imagined cities and their real-life counterparts.


In literary history, a long continuum of cities that stretch the limits of
the possible runs through the work of writers from Thomas More, Alexander
Pushkin, and Italo Calvino to contemporary speculative fiction, including
twenty-first-century dystopias and urban climate fiction. Like Calvino’s
no-longer-possible miniature versions of the city of Fedora, displayed in
crystal globes in a section of Invisible Cities, some fictitious cities
represent alternative futures conceivable at a specific moment in time.
Other literary cities, such as the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, are
impossible from the outset but draw attention to everyday urban
potentialities in ways that demand attention. Yet others would seem to
represent something akin to real-life cities but cannot – due to their very
identity as linguistic, imagined constructions – avoid engaging with the
(im)possible. The examination of literary cities as impossible (imaginary,
non-existent) or possible (future, alternative, desirable) thus also
encourages reflections concerning the referentiality of literary cities.
The conference ‘(Im)Possible Cities’ seeks new approaches to these
intertwinings of possibility and impossibility in cities and texts.


We invite papers on subjects including, but certainly not limited to, the
following themes:

    literary expressions of urban utopianism

    urban utopias and dystopias

    theories of (im)possibility and cities

    visionary thinking and literary cities

    ideal literary cities

    future studies and literary urban studies

    (im)possible cities and postcolonialism

    referentiality and the literary city

    city imaginaries and urban branding and/or urban planning

    readerly experiences of (im)possible cities

    enactivism and the literary city

    links between literature and the conceptual/imagined cities of
architecture and film

    modernist and postmodernist cities

    literary cities and the surreal


The deadline for paper proposals is 31 March 2017. Please submit proposals
(approximately 300 words) via the online form.


The language of the conference will be English, but papers focusing on
literature in any language in any part of the world are welcome. In
addition to literary scholars, it is very much hoped that researchers from
other disciplines will be interested in taking part. These could include,
but would not be limited to, the following: cultural and historical
geographers; urban sociologists, historians and planners; workers in visual
studies, cultural studies and art and architecture studies.

The first HLCN conference resulted in the collection of essays Literature
and the Peripheral City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and a comparable volume
premised on the theme of the second conference, literary second cities, is
in preparation. For more on the previous two conferences, see
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/conference/ and
http://www.abo.fi/fakultet/hlcn2. The first ALUS conference ‘(Im)Possible
Cities’ will continue to develop literary urban studies in a way that
crosses borders and challenges traditional divisions within the academy.


Note: the conference ”(Im)Possible Cities” (23-24 August) is organized in
close cooperation with the conference Re-City 2017, an urban studies and
urban planning conference also held in Tampere (24-25 August). Conference
cooperation includes a joint panel on Thursday 24 August. Participants in
the ALUS conference ”(Im)Possible Cities” can participate in both
conferences upon separate registration (one-day registration for Re-City
2017, Friday 25 August). The confirmed keynote speaker for 25 August is
prof. David Pinder (University of Roskilde).

For more information contact:


Markku Salmela, University of Tampere (markku.salmela at uta.fi)

Lieven Ameel, University of Tampere (lieven.ameel at uta.fi)

Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University (jfinch at abo.fi)