вторник, 15 мая 2012 г.

Representations - Struggles for Reality

Representations - Struggles for Reality
 

02.11.12-04.11.12
Deadline for abstracts: 8 June 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada


Part of the Research Program on: Aesthetic Lives, Artistic Selves
International Network for Alternative Academia
(Extends a general invitation to participate)

This trans-disciplinary project explores the creation, consumption and dissemination of representations. It aims to map out the relationship between representations, conceptions of the real and cultural constructions of reality. Examining representations as developing at the intersections of epistemological, political and ethical modes of enquiry, this symposium offers the opportunity to reflect on the practice and the theory of the constitution, legitimation and social implications of image, art and the new media.

We invite colleagues from all disciplines and professions interested in sharing these explorations in a collective, deliberative and dialogical environment to send presentation proposals that address these general questions or the following themes:

1. Real and Imaginary - A Political History

=> To Represent or To Reproduce?
- How is it that representations reflect, reproduce and create our sense of reality?
- How are representations and our concepts of reality interlaced and intertwined?
- What role do abstractions, conversions and distortions play in the construction of representations and our bonds to -weighty' conceptions of reality?

=> Power and Legitimacy
- What is at stake in the battles over representation? What is the relationship between power, reality and representation?
- What are the processes through which representations are legitimized and canonized?
- How is a sense of belonging and identity established in and through media, art and/or artistic creation? How are the threads of power and the needs for legitimacy played out in this context?
- How are self-representations to be assessed? How are misrepresentations to be responded to?
- Who gets to name what is real? What standard of evaluation should be employed?

=> You Say You Want A Revolution?: Rebellious Representations
- How are images and ideas transformed into action?
- What is the role of representation in political activism, religious proselytism, and contestation movements?
- How do representations fuel transformation and change? How do representations thwart such efforts?
- How are representations contested? What are the spaces for such deliberations?

2. The Authentic, The Original, The Real

=> On Authenticity
- In a world of reproduction, what is the meaning and the value of judgments of authenticity?
- What factors and institutions fuel the quest for the perfect representation in art and science?
- How are new technologies reconfiguring our understandings of authority and expertise?
- Are distortions of reality necessarily destructive? What are the potential productive forces of distortion?
- What does the return to the representative in contemporary representations reveal about present day conceptions of reality?

=> On Originality
- What is the relationship between The Original and the original?
- How are new understandings of originality reconfiguring our ideas of genius?
- In an era defined by pastiche and bricolage, how is originality to be assessed?
- Given the prevalence of prequels and sequels, remakes and remixes, are we bearing witness to the end of creativity and/or the end of originality?
- How are forgeries and fakes to be defined, identified and valued?
- What is the role of the signature in new forms of representation?

=> On Reality
- How are images transformed into icons?
- In what ways do icons reflect reality? In what ways do they deconstruct reality?
- How are multiple realities to be represented?
- How can emergent realities be captured?
- In what manner should competing representations be assessed? What standards of evaluation should be employed?
- What do pastiche, bricolage and hybridity reveal about our notions of reality?

3. Being, Becoming and Performing the Aesthetic

=> The Politics of Art and the Art of Politics
- What are the conditions for the possibility of an aestheticization of politics? How are those conditions met in contemporary cultures?
- What is the role of modern day patrons in the artworld?
- How will the history of the politicization of art be written?
- What does the history and the practice of curating reveal about the intersection of art and politics?
- What does the structure, organization and operation of art schools reveal about the politics in and of art?
- What factors shape and inform the development of a political economy of representations?
- How are representations interpreted as political gestures?

=> Technology as Practice
- How are new technologies for the creation, consumption and dissemination of representations leading us to reconceptualize The Artworld?
- How is art being commodified in and through new media? How are new technologies shaping and being shaped by the commodification of art?
- How do new technologies redefine our understanding of imagination?
- How is the relationship between technology and practice being re-established in a post-internet era?

=> Creativity and Critique
- How might art be conceived of as a form of critique?
- Can creativity be charted? What new models of creativity might be offered to capture how reality is transformed by representation and representations are transformed by reality?
- How might creativity be conceived of as critique?
- How are digital and virtual representations leading us to define creativity?
- What new horizons, new metaphors, new means for re-signifying life and experience in the virtual and non-virtual worlds are being envisioned?

If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.  Please use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF formats only and that you use plain text, resisting the temptation of using special formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Organizing Committee: Symposium Coordinators:

Cheryl Sim
Commissaire Associée
DHC/ART Fondation pour l'art contemporain
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Email: c-sim@alternative-academia.net

Wendy O'Brien
Professor of Social and Political Theory
School of Liberal Studies
Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Email: w-obrien@alternative-academia.net

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
General Coordinator
International Network for Alternative Academia
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Email: acc@alternative-academia.net
email: rsr-1@alternative-academia.net
Address: Please use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF formats only and that you use plain text, resisting the temptation of using special formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Please send emails with your proposals to the Annual Symposium Coordination address (rsr-1@alternative-academia.net) with the following subject line: Representations - Struggles for Reality Abstract Proposal.

For every abstract proposal sent, we acknowledge receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us within one week you should assume we did not receive it. Please resend from your account and from an alternative one, to make sure your proposal does get to us.

Otherness, Agency and Belonging

Otherness, Agency and Belonging

06.11.12-08.11.12
Deadline for abstracts: 8 June 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada


Part of the Research Program on: Recognition, Agency and the Politics of Otherness

International Network for Alternative Academia
(Extends a general invitation to participate)

This trans-disciplinary research project explores the unfolding dynamic of the relationship between self and other as it is enacted in our experiences of being strangers, aliens and foreigners. Examining the history of this relationship, reflecting upon its ideological and psychological foundations, and bearing witness to its manifestation in the lived experiences of migrants, refugees and the displaced, this symposium offers the opportunity to consider at the level of both theory and practice, new means for establishing a sense of belonging and new methods for engaging the other.

We invite colleagues from all disciplines and professions interested in exploring and explaining these issues in a collective, deliberative and dialogical environment to send presentation proposals that address these general questions or the following themes:

1. Practice, Logic and Dialogue

=> Being and Belonging
- How is belonging conceptualized? How is it lived?
- What are the psychological and the ideological foundations for the need to belong?
- How do ideals of belonging shape and inform the practice of recognition?
- How is the need to belong politicized?
- In what ways are notions of belonging being reconfigured in response to the rise of new technologies and new media? In what ways is the need to belong shaping these developments?

=> Language Lessons
- Can we speak of the self without the other? Can there be a language of -we-ness'? What terms would it employ? How would the grammar for such a language be constructed?
- What metaphors can be employed in the construction of alternatives to binary representations of self and other?
- How are new languages -new terminologies and new structures- being lived? That is, how are they already shaping experience through and in the development of idioms and rhetoric, signs and symbols?
- What alternatives might dialogical acts of speaking provide for addressing the other and the self? How might referential acts be used as a model for rethinking self-other relations?
- What role might embodiment and location play in rethinking difference?

2. Shifting Planes and Contexts

=> Monetary Values
- What is the role of labour migration for economic growth and prosperity? How are the contributions of labour migration being recognized? How are they being measured?
- How is migrant labour commodified? What are the effects of this commodification?
- What is the political value of migrants and foreigners, strangers and aliens, refugees and the displaced? How are they made -invisible' within nations and states? At what moments are they made visible? How is this dialectic of visibility played out, experienced and conceived?
- What new models of economic/political inclusion/exclusion are we witnessing?

=> Environment and the Link to Nature
- How are self and other interweaved with nature? What norms, orientations and models prevail? Are there alternatives that are being collectively enacted? How might these bonds be reconceptualised?
- What indigenous worldviews might foster the construction of new models of diversity and plurality?
- How is the new class of environmental migrants being constructed and conceived?

=> A Whole New World
- Who are the new migrants? How are new migratory flows and massive movements mapping out, both literally and figuratively?
- How are trans-national and post-national ideologies reconfiguring our conceptions of the other?
- Who is our neighbour? Do we owe our neighbour hospitality and respect? Why?
- How is responsibility to be attributed in a world that is on the move?

3. Enquiry and Legitimacy

=> Representations
- How are representations of difference created and disseminated through the arts and media?
- By what means and through what measures do art and media instil and embed images of otherness? How might these avenues of production be used to transform and deconstruct such representations?
- How are new technologies and new media framing our ideas of otherness?
- What are the stories of strangers, the allegories of aliens, the fictions of foreigners and the discourses of the displaced being told? How are such narratives constructed? With what affect?

=> Acts of Legitimation: On Law
- How do nation states exclude juridically? How do laws protect and/or exclude the other?
- How do citizens and non-citizens relate within juridical practices and discourse?
- What place do human rights occupy in facilitating inclusionary and/or exclusionary practices?
- How are trans-national and post-national ideologies configuring conceptions of self and other?

4. Challenging Ideals

=> Productive Possibilities
- How do our encounters with strangers, aliens and foreigners enrich our lives?
- What are the productive advantages of being deemed -the other'?
- What of our experiences of -othering' ourselves? When and why do we choose to be foreigners? How do these experiences differ from those in which we are ascribed this condition and status?

=> The Spaces In-Between: Beyond Self and Other
- In what ways are self and other interdependent? What is the history of this interlacing?
- How are the layerings and overlappings of our identifications as self and other, self or other lived?
- What new models of/for exchange and engagement are developing in theory and in practice?
- How might new models of cultural contact based on ideals of fusion, entanglement, doubleness, syncretism, amalgamation, creolization, interlacing, hybridization and interdependence, destabilize the logic of a binary system of self and other? How might they re-enforce this logic?

If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.

Organizing Committee: Symposium Coordinators:

Wendy O'Brien
Professor of Social and Political Theory
School of Liberal Studies
Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Email: w-obrien@alternative-academia.net

Oana Stugaru
Faculty of Letters and Communication Sciences
Stefan cel Mare University
Suceava, Romania
Email: o-strugaru@alternative-academia.net

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
General Coordinator
International Network for Alternative Academia
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Email: acc@alternative-academia.net
email: oab-4@alternative-academia.net
Address: If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.  Please use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF formats only and that you use plain text, resisting the temptation of using special formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Please send emails with your proposals to the Annual Symposium Coordination address (oab-4@alternative-academia.net) with the following subject line: Otherness, Agency & Belonging Abstract Proposal.

For every abstract proposal sent, we acknowledge receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us within one week you should assume we did not receive it. Please resend from your account and from an alternative one, to make sure your proposal does get to us.

3rd European Urban Summer School


Globalisation, climate change, resource depletion and financial crises are the prevailing – and often crippling – conditions which shape our immediate professional and academic lives and longer-term futures. In our times of rapid change, young planners, architects and designers must develop and adopt new and more holistic approaches to planning and design in order to engage in a meaningful manner with an increasingly urban world and to propose creative interventions that go beyond the immediately physical.

The 3rd European Urban Summer School (EUSS) is a joint project of AESOP / ECTP-CEU / IFHP / ISOCARP and SCIBE, hosted by the SCIBE team at the University of Westminster, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, from 21 to 30 September 2012 (http://www.scibe.eu/category/euss/). It aims to bring together postgraduate students, emerging and experienced academics and young and established design and planning professionals from all over Europe (and further away) to develop a better understanding of some of the most pressing contemporary issues related to the built environment and to amplify and strengthen the links between planning- and design-relevant research and professional practice.

This year's EUSS is an invitation – a call to arms – to engage in the quest for and development of new ways of thinking about and new tools in response to emerging issues of scarcity – a condition generally defined by the insufficiency of cultural, social or economic resources. But scarcity is about more than simple resource depletion:  it is embedded in political, social and ecological systems. How and by whom is scarcity generated, engineered, constructed and perceived? What are we, as practitioners in an urban context, to do under conditions of scarcity in the built environment? The EUSS is an invitation to reclaim the possibility of making the city in our times of scarcity.

Potential participants and tutors are encouraged to apply via email as early as possible in order to be considered (see http://www.scibe.eu/category/euss/ for details on the application process for participants and tutors). The application deadline is 31 May 2012. The EUSS 2012 Joint Committee (Deljana Iossifova and Jeremy Till (University of Westminster), Maros Finka (AESOP), Dominique Lancrenon (ECTP-CEU), Piotr Lorens (ISOCARP), Derek Martin (IFHP) and Izabela Mironowicz (AESOP)) will select up to 60 Young Planning Professionals and the most suitable tutors.

Please refer to the website for all relevant information!