[URBANTH-L]FW: Taking Up Space (An Interdisciplinary Conference)

[Ana Servigna]

FYI

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-----Original Message-----
From: H-NET Urban History Discussion List [mailto:H-URBAN at H-NET.MSU.EDU] On
Behalf Of Wendy Plotkin
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 5:20 PM
To: H-URBAN at H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: CFP: Taking Up Space (An Interdisciplinary Conference)

From: Patrick McElwee <patrick.mcelwee at duke.edu>

Call for Papers
Taking Up Space: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Hosted by Duke History Graduate Students with
Support from the Sociology Department, Latino/a
Studies, and the Women's Studies Program
January 29, 2010 (Abstract Submissions due November 1, 2009)

A central feature of Western scientific thought
originated by René Descartes and elaborated
further by physicists and mathematicians has been
a notion of space as a container within which
objects exist and actions take place. Despite the
widespread acceptance of all-encompassing
mathematical and physical space as part of our
inherited common sense, scholars have
increasingly questioned its relevance for the
spaces of human activity. They have explored
other spaces, including literary space, social
space, mental space, the space of the body,
racialized and gendered spaces, cities, regions,
oceans and the globe. They have drawn attention
to the production of spaces, the power relations
imbued within them, and various ways in which
space can be productive, prohibitive or
instrumental for human actors. There has also
been renewed attention to scholarly spatial
methodology regarding scale and the appropriate
distance between the research and the researched.

We invite scholars across disciplines to submit
papers for a one-day conference during which we
will place into dialogue a wide variety of
approaches to questions of space and consider
their application to historical inquiry. We
specifically encourage with works in progress or
at an early stage in their research, including
pre-dissertation graduate students, to apply.
Drawing on diverse traditions, we hope to explore
how to understand the production and productive
capacity of sites, locations, scales, and geographies.

Submissions to the conference could address, but
are by no means limited to, the following topics:

        o The production and erosion of particular spaces.

        o Lived spaces and hegemonic spaces.

        o Landscapes and their meanings.

        o The spatial constitution of identities, politics and knowledges.

        o Relations between Mathematical,
physical, mental and social space.

        o Capitalist structures, creative
destruction and alternative or oppositional economic spaces.

        o Money, capital and the trend toward
eliminating spatial differentiation.

        o Fixed investments in space.

        o Modern, premodern and postmodern spaces.

        o Mobility, territory, nationalism and community.

        o Geographic scales, social topography,
cartography and globalization.

        o Ideologies of space.

        o Racial, class and gender power relations embodied in landscape.

        o Social movements and public space.

        o Environmental histories of natural and
built environments and ecosystems.

        o Uneven development and disruptions of historical periodizations.

        o The history of science and technology.

        o Scholarly distancing and other spatial methodologies.

The conference will consist of panels organized
around specific questions with a commenter.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 350
words by November 1, 2009, to Patrick McElwee at
pmm21 at duke.edu. Those selected will be notified
by November 15, 2009. The conference will take
place at Duke University on Friday, January 29, 2010.

Patrick McElwee
Duke University
Department of History
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/grad/specialty.html

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