[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: Public Space and Urban Experiences in Ottoman Cities

[Gonul Pultar]

From: Sibel Z. Sayek <ssayek at wm.edu>


Call for Papers: Public Space and Urban Experiences in Ottoman Cities

The European Association of Urban Historians
Tenth International Conference on Urban History
City & Society in European History
Ghent 1st-4th September 2010


This panel seeks to explore and relate different understandings of 
public space in major cities of the Ottoman empire, from the Balkans to 
Istanbul and the Arab lands in the eighteenth and the nineteenth 
centuries. Building on recent scholarship that critically historicizes 
the social production of public space, it aims to bring a comparative 
and trans-regional perspective to the processes and tensions inherent to 
the making of Ottoman public space. We are especially interested in 
exploring the continual transformations of the concept of public in 
reformulating the lines of public and private, both in the period 
preceding the centralization of urban order and in the context of the 
rapid urbanization and modernization of the second half of the 
nineteenth century.

We would like to invite contributions that address how public space was
defined, experienced, and conceptualized through legal or socio-legal
norms, patterns of ownership, daily lives and practices, and inclusions
and exclusions in relation to such categories as gender, age, religion,
ethnicity, and resident and immigrant status. Preference will be given 
to papers that ground a strong theoretical framework in a historical 
analysis of particular sites and acknowledge the fluid nature of public 
space.

Among the range of issues that submissions might address are the
relationship between public order and spatial order; public space and
conceptions of the public good; the nature of the public in Ottoman 
public space; public behavior and morality; uses of and engagements with 
public spaces; social and spatial delineations of public and private. 
Ultimately, we would like to use this session as a venue for discussing 
innovative methodologies and new ways for scholarly engagement with the 
study of cities in multicultural societies within the Ottoman context 
and beyond.

Abstracts (max. 500 words) can be submitted on the conference website
http://www.eauh2010.ugent.be/en between 1 October and 1 December 2009.

Please also send a copy of the abstract along with a short CV via e-mail
to both session organizers at: shirine at rice.edu and ssayek at wm.edu

Shirine Hamadeh
Department of Art History
Rice University

Sibel Zandi-Sayek
Department of Art and Art History
College of William and Mary