[URBANTH-L]First International Conference of Young Urban Researchers (FICYUrb): Call for Papers

[Graça Índias Cordeiro]

Call for Papers

 

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