Conference IMAGES (III) - Images of the City: Call for Papers
Please, find the CfP for our IMAGES project 2013 conference IMAGES (III) - Images of the City below.
IMAGES (3) - Images of the City Conference CFP (25-04-2013)
After the conferences IMAGES (I) – Films as Spaces of Cultural Encounters (2011) and IMAGES (II) – Images of the Poor (2012) the IMAGES project is planning to focus on images of the city in its 2013 conference IMAGES (III) – Images of the City. Recent statistics say that by the turn of the years 2012/13 world population reached the approx. number of 7.1 billion (milliard) people, and the United Nations estimate that by 2025 this number will have climbed to 8.17 billion (milliard). According to Germany based Stiftung Weltbevölkerung presently about every second world citizen lives in an urban environment; this number having climbed to an estimated third of population worldwide by 2050. On the other hand statistics point out that the increase in urban population is mainly due to migration movements leading people from very diverse backgrounds into urban environments; most of them seeing the city as kind of a "safe haven” of any sort. As a consequence of these processes the urban environment is undergoing a constant development and change. Regarding this fact the IMAGES project has decided to discuss the (historically) changing shaping, representation and perceptions of the city as a cultural concept (i.e. the changing images of the city) in its 2013 conference IMAGES (III) – Images of the City; the urban concept creating a sheer unlimited number of potential cases of cultural encounters ranging from architectonical realisations of ideologically motivated views of the world to the development of certain representation practices of cityscapes in photography and the arts, and the (virtual) discussions of concepts and strategies conveyed by urban concepts in fiction; all providing the public with realisations of political and related ideas of all sorts and thus linking the concept of urbanity to a whole range of socially relevant fields like politics, communication, culture, and migration. In order to discuss issues like the above IMAGES (III) – Images of the City invites scholars, but also architects, photographers, writers, artists and filmmakers to propose papers in the following fields of research and interest:
The relative definition of urbanity
The psychology of feeling urban or/ and rural
Cityscapes as statements
The impact of the media (news, internet, daily soaps) on the perception of urbanity/ urban life style
Images of the city/ urbanity in feature films (present and past)
Images of the city/ urbanity in the Arts (present and past)
The city/ urbanity as seen by photographers (present and past)
Images of the city/ urbanity in literature (present and past)
Images of the city/ urbanity as an issue of a developed civil society (including aspects like migration, social marginalization)
The conference IMAGES (III) – Images of the City is planned as a 2-3 days interdisciplinary international conference. It will bring together senior scholars with PhD students, postdoctoral academics, and members of the artistic community without following the classical keynote speaker pattern but rather inviting all speakers either to present their research findings in 20 minute (paper) presentations plus 10 minutes for discussion or in 120-150 minute panels (4-5 panellists). There will be no parallel sessions. All sessions will be plenary sessions. The conference language is English. Selected articles of each session/ field of research will be published as a volume of conference proceedings. Münster, Berlin, Vienna and New York based LIT Verlag has already declared strong interest in publishing the conference proceedings. The publication will provide space for black-and-white illustrations. At the time of the conference the IMAGES project 2013-2014 exhibitions "Images of the City” and "Images of Istanbul” will be showing.
Conference site and date: Istanbul, Austrian Cultural Forum, 2-3 days 30 October-1 November 2013
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