[URBANTH-L] CFP: 1st International Conference of Young Urban Researchers (Lisbon)

Angela Jancius jancius at ohio.edu
Sun Jan 21 12:16:34 EST 2007


From: Graça Índias Cordeiro <graca.cordeiro at iscte.pt>

Dear Colleagues:

The First International Conference of Young Urban Researchers (FICYUrb)
will take place at ISCTE, in Lisbon – Portugal, June 11th and 12th,
2007. The organization of this scientific meeting was born from the will
to create a space of interdisciplinary debate.  Young researchers in
urban studies that work and develop their academic researches on cities
– especially students of postgraduate programmes and young academics but
also those who intervene directly in national or international agencies,
NGOs or municipalities – are expected to play a major role in this
scientific meeting dynamic’s. The Conference is intended to be an
adequate space to disseminate the most recent academic researches in
urban studies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives of the
social sciences. The organization believes that this space may be
appropriate to promote interdisciplinary networks. While encouraging an
international scientific debate, the Conference will provide a place of
interchange between young urban studies practitioners and senior
academics with a wide experience, especially those invited to the
Opening and Final lectures in the meeting.

The conference organization will be provided by Centro de Investigação e
Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-ISCTE) in cooperation with Fórum
Sociológico, Journal from Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da
Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH/UNL) and Instituto de Sociologia da
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (IS-FLUP).

The organizing team is composed by Professor Graça Índias Cordeiro
(principal adviser) and by the postgraduate students on urban
anthropology, sociology and history: Gonçalo Gonçalves, Inês Pereira,
João Pedro Nunes, Lígia Ferro and Rita Cachado.
The Council of Program will provide scientific support to the organizing
team. This Council is composed by researchers and university lecturers
in Anthropology, Architecture, Geography, History and Sociology: Alain
Bourdin, Álvaro Domingues, Annick Germain, António Firmino da Costa,
Carles Feixa, Emílio Duhau, Frédéric Vidal, Gilberto Velho, João Cabral,
João Teixeira Lopes, Jorge Malheiros, Juan Pujadas, Luís Baptista, Luís
Fernandes, Manuel C. Teixeira, Maria Alexandre Lousada, Michel Agier,
Nuno Luís Madureira., Roselyne de Villanova, Tim Sieber.


We welcome papers which address the following and other themes: 

T01 – Politics, power and negotiating processes 
The city is a space of power and negotiation. What politics define and
stipulate life in the urban territories? Recognizing that relationships
of power are negotiated in the different urban contexts of interaction,
what kind of relationships are those? What agents, such as associations
and social movements among others, produce politics in and of the city? 

T02 – Social movements: cultural practices and contexts
Social movements are also protagonists of the city, crucial agents that
define a city as contestant and ‘alternative’. Which types of circuits
and contexts of interaction and sociability are defined by social
movements? Which symbolic references are created by them? And what
cultural practices are transformed by them? By these and other means, do
social movements have a say in the great urban kaleidoscope?

T03 – Communication and mediation: awkward relations between immigrants
and institutions. 
Administrative professionals and immigrated populations have different
reality readings which turn into different kinds of answers in both
sides of the relationship. With what difficulties are immigrants
confronted in the institutional encounter? What kind of strategies of
resistance and adaptation do they develop to answer to difficulties
raised in those situations?

T04 – Informal economies in urban contexts 
Informality as an alternative way of life to formal economy may appear
as a kind of adaptation or as resistance to imposed formal systems.
Which rules and languages can we use to define informal economies? Where
and how do they show up? Who may we define as actors and receivers,
inside and outside of the institutionalized system?

T05 – Politics, practices and urban identities
Cities are places of diversity and cultural effervescence. What kind of
relationships can we find between culture and arts on the one hand and
economy and politics on the other hand? How European, national and local
politics are articulated in the process of democratization of culture?
What identity strategies mediate the level of practices and the level of
politics in urban context? What role is played by variables such as
class, ethnicity, gender, etc., in social analysis of cultural
practices?

T06 – Built Spaces, conflict and social inequalities in the enlarged
city 
Continuity and change are permanently articulated and re-composed in the
renewal of urban built environment. Public and private actors associate
and oppose themselves along construction processes either increasingly
marked by great visibility or inhabited by intense conflict patterns.
How do building practices intervene in the creation of new and old
patterns of urban social inequality? What configurations of interests
and images of the city - the metropolitan populations, "users",
“residents” and spaces - are created and recreated in the social
construction of urban space?

T07 – Urban territories planning, design and uses of urban space
The organization of city space involves a set of complex relationships
between political actors, architects and populations. What type of
negotiation is carried out between the several instances implicated in
these processes? What is the role of public space architecture in our
days? And, being aware of a gap between the conception of space and its
daily uses, what kind of strategies both architects and populations use
in order to negotiate the organization of space? 

T08 – Movement, flows and uses of public space
In the past, as today, the movement in the city produces political,
technician know-how and everyday life experiences. From pedestrian
sidewalks to circulation in highways, from information flows to the
collection of urban garbage, there are multiple contexts where we can
analyze the way the city constitutes and is constituted by the movement
of information, people and goods. What different flows construct urban
spaces and realms – e.g. “public”, “collective” – and by which anchor
processes these flows fix themselves in territories?

T09 – Work, territories and organizations – restructuration and life
styles

The division of social labour is being increasingly intensified at a
planetary scale. From the industrial city to the contemporary
metropolitan area, spaces, times and organizational forms of labour are
being reconfigured (for example, night-work, second jobs, itinerating
jobs, etc
).  Are life styles being changed, together with the process
of interdependence between the central city and the peripheral city?
What changes in the world of labour are reverberated in the cities and
its organization?

T10: Dispersion / concentration: urban socialization in the splintered
city
Marked by the concentration of elites in specific zones and by processes
of ‘ghettization’, the city appears as a segregated space, with niches
of wealth and poverty (closed condominiums, popular neighbourhoods,
high-specialized commercial spaces, etc.). Which logics of distinction
and what discrimination processes generate this city? And what
relational processes of transgression dilute the borders within the
city?


T11 World-City/Cities in the World? Competition and hierarchy,
differentiation and fragmentation

The proportion of urban population in the world is growing. The destiny
of cities and urban territories depends on a global scale process of
competition and differentiation. How to analyse the relations between
the world economy dynamics and the spatial, social and political
differentiation occurring in the urbanized world? What old and new urban
and economic action models are being recreated? Which groups or classes,
economic or cultural millieux stand at the forefront of urban and
economic change, and which ones stand at less visible positions?        



Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words and a short
biography/Vita by March 16th, 2007. We accept papers in Portuguese,
English, Spanish and French. Authors should let us know in which
language they prefer to present their papers.
Authors will be noticed by April 2nd, 2007. Completed Papers expected by
May 14th, 2007. Guidelines for authors will be sent soon.
For other information please consult:
https://conferencias.iscte.pt/index.php?cf=3

Eventual doubts should be addressed at ficyurb.cies at iscte.pt


Graça Índias Cordeiro
Departamento Antropologia/ Centro Investigação Estudos de Sociologia
ISCTE - Av. das Forças Armadas
1649-026 LISBOA
Telef. (351) 217903221   Fax. (351) 217903012
graca.cordeiro at iscte.pt





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