[Bilimsel Haber] Fwd: Call for Papers:Mediterranean Encounters in the City Extended Deadline

[Onur Inal]

From: Michela Ardizzoni <mardizzo at gmail.com>
Subject: Call for Papers:Mediterranean Encounters in the City Extended Deadline
Date: October 24, 2010


CALL FOR PAPERS: MEDITERRANEAN ENCOUNTERS IN THE CITY

EXTENDED DEADLINES: NOVEMBER 15, 2010.

The conference "Mediterranean Encounters in the City" will be held at
the University of Colorado - Boulder on April 15-16, 2011.

This conference aims to document and analyze how the contemporary
Mediterranean city manages and negotiates its identity as a result of
recent reconfigurations in its cultural, religious, and social
landscape. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have recast difference as a
central trope of identification in urban settings, unleashing heated
debates about cultural convergences and animating anxieties about an
arguable clash of civilizations in modern cities. These emerging
uncertainties have also grown stronger as the homogenizing forces of
globalization unsettle essential principles of the nation-state and
nationhood and render fixed perceptions of distinctive and singular
people and cultures more tenuous. Recent scholarship and public
discourse have accordingly framed discussions of these encounters
around concerns of geo-political security and international policy;
unfortunately, framed within these terms, our understanding of how
various groups within the Mediterranean metropolis deal with the
intensification of difference as a lived experience has remained
regrettably thin. This conference seeks to transcend this limitation
and explore new, interdisciplinary research paradigms that will help
us gain a comprehensive perspective on how complex macro and micro
tensions, contradictions and similarities are negotiated in building
urban identities in the Mediterranean basin.

Given the large social and cultural transformations wrought by steady
waves of migration and a historical geographic predisposition to new
cultural interactions and encounters, we seek to account and analyze
competing narratives of the Mediterranean today through the
reconfiguration of its cities. Much of the debate on the Mediterranean
today has focused on a single and holistic conception of culture
(i.e., Mediterranean borders as porous, the Mediterranean basin as
locus of cultural exchange, Mediterranean cultures as more receptive
of difference). This conference looks to inquire whether this vision
of Mediterranean culture is as definite and rooted in today's urban
environments.

Proposals on the following topics are particularly welcome:

What constitutes the Mediterranean city? What are some of its
contemporary defining characteristics? Is there a new Mediterranean
urban order as cities are re-inscribed in a new space of modernity?
How are Mediterranean cities re-imagined as mediated articulations of
place beyond the binary of the foreign and the indigenous?
How do various mediations of the Mediterranean city through film,
television, music, literature, architecture, etc. reflect patterns of
broad historical, social and cultural change?
In what ways does the Mediterranean city act as a stage for the
articulation of  urban identities?
Does the Mediterranean basin today act as a medium for communication
between Mediterranean cities? Will the recent re-emergence of cultural
and religious pluralism in the area lead to new competing visions for
a transnational collective identity?
How do individual/local Mediterranean identities compare to collective
national notions of cultural and social belonging?
The impact of new media and virtual representations on the
construction of the Mediterranean urban identity.
Methodologies: how to study the Mediterranean city in the age of
globalization? How can academic interdisciplinarity help us document
and analyze the constant mutations and articulations of the
Mediterranean city?

Please send a 300-word abstract along with a short biographical note
by November 15, 2010 to Michela Ardizzoni, Dept. of French and
Italian, University of Colorado - Boulder: michela.ardizzoni at colorado.edu

Confirmed plenary speakers include:

Dr. Franco Cassano, professor of sociology at the university of Bari
(Italy) and author of the groundbreaking book Il pensiero meridiano on
Southern identities and the relationship between North and South in
the age of modernity.
Dr. Lila Leontidou, professor of geography and European culture at the
Hellenic Open University (Greece) and author of The Mediterranean City
in Transition, a study of the spatial practices of Mediterranean urban
popular classes in the 20th century.

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Michela Ardizzoni, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of French and Italian
University of Colorado at Boulder
Woodbury 407
UCB 238
Boulder, CO 80309-0238
Ph. 303-735-3562
Fax: 303-492-8338
Email: michela.ardizzoni at colorado.edu
Website: http://www.michelaardizzoni.com

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