City From Below

The city from below: call for participation

March 27th-29th, 2009
Baltimore

http://cityfrombelow.org

The city has emerged in recent years as an indispensable concept for
many of the struggles for social justice we are all engaged in - it's
a place where theory meets practice, where the neighborhood organizes
against global capitalism, where unequal divisions based on race and
class can be mapped out block by block and contested, where the
micropolitics of gender and sexual orientation are subject to
metropolitan rearticulation, where every corner is a potential site
of resistance and every vacant lot a commons to be reclaimed, and,
most importantly, a place where all our diverse struggles and
strategies have a chance of coming together into something greater.
In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being,
hidden histories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are
being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so
to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our
stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink
the city from below. To that end, a group of activists and
organizers, including Red Emma's, the Indypendent Reader,
campbaltimore, and the Campaign for a Better Baltimore are calling
for a conference called The City From Below, to take place in
Baltimore during the weekend of March 27,28,29, 2009 at 2640, a
grassroots community center and events venue.

Our intention to focus on the city first and foremost stems from our
own organizing experience, and a recognition that the city is very
often the terrain on which we fight, and which we should be fighting
for. To take a particularly salient example from Baltimore, it is
increasingly the case that labor struggles, especially in the service
sector, need to confront not just unfair employers, but structurally
disastrous municipal development policies. While the financial crisis
plays out in the national news and in the spectacle of legislative
action, it is at the level of the urban community where foreclosures
can be directly challenged and the right to a non-capitalist relation
to housing can be fought for. Our right to an autonomous culture, to
our freedom to dissent, to public spaces and to public education all
hinge increasingly on our relation to the cities in which we live and
to the people and forces in control of them. And our cities offer
some truly inspiring and creative examples of resistance - from the
community garden to the neighborhood assembly.

We are committed in organizing this conference to a horizontal
framework of participation, one which allows us to concretely engage
with and support ongoing social justice struggles. What we envision
is a conference which isn't just about academics and other
researchers talking to each other and at a passive audience, but one
where some of the most inspiring campaigns and projects on the
frontlines of the fight for the right to the city (community anti-
gentrification groups, transit rights activists, tenant unions,
alternative development advocates) will not just be represented, but
will concretely benefit from the alliances they build and the
knowledge they gain by attending.

At the same time, we also want to productively engage those within
the academic system, as well as artists, journalists, and other
researchers. It is a mistake to think that people who spend their
lives working on urban geography and sociology, in urban planning, or
on the history of cities have nothing to offer to our struggles. At
the same time, we recognize that too often the way in which academics
engage activists, if they do so at all, is to talk at them. We are
envisioning something much different, closer to the notion of
"accompaniment". We want academics and activists to talk to each
other, to listen to each other, and to offer what they each are best
able to. Concretely, we're hoping to facilitate this kind of dynamic
by planning as much of the conference as possible as panels involving
both scholars and organizers.

THEMES TO BE CONSIDERED
0. Gentrification/uneven development
0. Policing and incarceration
0. Tenants rights/housing as a right
0. Public transit
0. Urban worker's rights
0. Foreclosures/financial crisis
0. Public education
0. Slots/casionos/regressive taxation
0. Cultural gentrification
0. Underground economies
0. Reclaiming public space
0. The right to the city
0. Squatting
0. Urban sustainability

PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS

Please share with us your proposal for workshops or presentations. We
hope to host 15-25 sessions with a mixture of formats and welcome
proposals from groups and individuals. The conference is geared
towards discussion and participation. People are welcome to bring
papers andother resources with them, but this conference is not
oriented to the presentation of papers. There will be 50 and 110
minute sessions. We welcome self organized workshops but will also
work to incorporate individual proposals into panels with others. In
your proposal please indicate how your proposal relates to the themes
of the conference, expected participants, organizing partners and
session format (training, panel, open discussion, video, etc.) and
how long the session will be. We are especially interested in
proposals which combine critique of the urban environment with
discussions of new strategies for its reclamation.

Please send proposals to:

cityfrombelow -at- redemmas.org

Email is preferred, but you can also send a proposal to:

City from Below
c/o Red Emma's
800 St Paul St.
Baltimore MD 21202

Nutopia : Exploring The Metropolitan Imagination

Nutopia : Exploring The Metropolitan Imagination
2/3 April 2009

Call for speakers
Deadline for application 30th November 2008

"Each epoch dreams the one to follow"
Michelet, Avenir! Avenir!


A multi disciplinary platform for artists/ archaeologists/ social scientists/
architects/ urban planners/ developers/ environmentalists/ activists and
regeneration/ housing, to meet and make visible their perspectives on the 21c
city; the nature of community, the human narrative, the new - utopia's which
we may be able to find present amongst contemporary town planning and
architecture.


The symposium will be set in Cardiff's Victorian and Edwardian Arcades, home
to a host of independent shops and against the backdrop of Saint Davids 2,
the city's under- construction shopping centre, which has been designed for
larger retailers, primarily multi + national chains. Both architectural
manifestations speak variously of social, economic and cultural shifts and
provide a lens through which to explore a multiplicity of perspectives, framing
our position as individuals and communities within the model of the 'global'
or 'regenerated' city. The aim of the symposium is to create a map of
perspectives revealing our thoughts on the 21c metropolitan 'imagination'.


Submissions are invited for a 20 minute paper / to host a break out discussion
or run a workshop or event in response to the above. Please feel free to
respond with a short abstract outlining an area of research or as a project
which befits the idea or possibility or new- utopia's.


Symposium Format: Working in response to submitted abstracts/ proposals,
your presentations will be located in different places in the city eg. Floor 5 of
NCP Carpark, Arcade basement, in a cafe/ pub, or in shopping centre's/
arcades/ office spaces etc in order to contextualise the discussion and to
create a dynamic between what is being discussed and a physical place. The
audience will be small and all presentations will be documented in location then
made available online please state in your proposal if you need to show images.


Please send 1 side of A4 outlining your responses in relation to your practice/
field, a CV and links to website/ blogs.


All speakers will have the option of having their paper included in the Museum
Of The Moment Archive* and also be featured in "The Arcades Project: A 3D
Documentary" Publication (Jan 2010).


UK travel costs will be covered/ free entrance and lunch provided during the
event participation fee to be agreed.


To make a submission email jennie@arcadesproject.org
To find out more about The Arcades Project : A 3D Documentary go to
www.arcadesproject.org



*The Museum Of The Moment Archive will be a multi media archive which will
be installed in the city centre as 'permanent' legacy of the project.

Dreamland Pavilion

Conference - The Dreamland Pavilion: Brooklyn and Development
October 2-3, 2009, Kingsborough Community College, The City University
of New York
CALL FOR PAPERS

How has Brooklyn become what it is—a place of nostalgia, imagination,
or fantasy as much as a territorial space, an "outer borough" of New
York City? Isn't it time to assess critically the rapid changes in
the borough over the last decade? With tremendous growth comes
certain costs, but how do we evaluate the present moment, poised
between Brooklyn past and Brooklyn future? How is "development"
defined differently by different groups in different contexts?
Finally, how do Brooklyn's diverse localities and populations reflect
or even shape the future of New York, a global metropolis? This
conference aims to be a space within which these and other questions
will be addressed, discussed, even answered. The two-day gathering
will combine moderated panels (in both traditional academic and
roundtable formats), guided visits to local sites, artistic
performances and discussion.

We welcome proposals from all relevant academic disciplines, including
history, literary studies, political science, geography, and
sociology. We are equally interested in proposals from those outside
academia, including architects, artists, journalists, activists, urban
planners and others concerned with Brooklyn in particular and urban
space in general.

The primary areas we will focus on in the conference are:

--The Arts and Cultural Practices: the borough's relationship to film,
literature, and the performing arts.

--Development Projects: the conflicts and controversies surrounding
Brooklyn's most important contemporary development projects,

--Demographics and Diversity: the broader forces that have reshaped
Brooklynites' lives in past and present, including migration,
education, housing and urban politics.

Possible topics for panelists to address within these areas could include:

--Renters and homeowners

--Decision-making processes

--Relationship of arts and culture to neighborhood geography

--Case studies of particular neighborhoods

--The Atlantic Yards project or Coney Island redevelopment

--Dynamics of race and/or ethnicity

--Environmental impact of development

--Access to local institutions

--Privatization and public space


Proposals should be submitted by February 1, 2009 and should include:

--A one-page description of your topic

--Contact information: Name, position and affiliation, telephone
numbers (home and cellphone), mail address and e-mail.


Please email completed proposals to Dr. Rick Armstrong, Department of
English, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York,
at: stephen.armstrong@kingsborough.edu.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Eben Wood, Department of English
Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York
2001 Oriental Blvd.
Brooklyn, NY 11235
(718) 368-5229
eben.wood@kingsborough.edu

or

Dr. Libby Garland, Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science
Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York
2001 Oriental Blvd.
Brooklyn, NY 11235
(718) 368-5624
libby.garland@kingsborough.edu

Please also visit our conference website at:
http://www.kingsborough.edu/dreamland_pavilion.

CFP: Radical History Review

from HNET

"Enclosures": A call for abstracts by the Radical History Review

Publication Date: 2009-02-01
Date Submitted: 2008-10-01
Announcement ID: 164326

Call for Abstract Submissions Radical History Review Issue #108: "Enclosures"

Abstract Submission Deadline: February 1, 2009 Email: rhr@igc.org

The Radical History Review seeks submissions for an issue dedicated to the theme of “Enclosures”: a term that refers to the twin phenomenon of proprietary demarcation and dispossession that has accompanied the global transition to industrial capitalism in cities and rural areas alike. In a variety of geographical and chronological contexts, this issue will explore both the symbolic and the literal, material senses of the historical process of enclosure.

Contemporary thinkers have evoked the concept of enclosure in a vast variety of settings and across the ideological spectrum, from Garrett Hardin’s prescriptive discussion of the “tragedy of the commons” and the neoliberal doctrine of the inherent instability of the commons, to E. P. Thompson’s studies of the social and legal conflicts over the peasantry’s use of the commons in early modern England. The concept of the commons has become a generic metaphor for public property—academic disciplinary knowledge and access to the airwaves, for example—and, by extension, the commonweal. Likewise, the enclosure of the commons has taken multiple meanings that extend the idea of the fencing off of common property in the interest of private gain and liberal (or neoliberal) individual property rights. As multifarious as it is, the concept of enclosure may provide a historically coherent way of considering disparate instances of conflicts over subsistence rights in the face of the division of property.

This special issue offers an opportunity to take stock of the idea of enclosure—to explore the connections between, for example, the type of “primitive accumulation” for which the term was originally applied and its more abstract, contemporary instances, and to historicize rigorously its application. To what degree was there ever really a “commons”? How did constructions of sacrosanct public space and its privatization and dispossession become naturalized features of cultural life? By collectively publishing work on such diverse phenomena as urban squatters throughout the world, intellectual property, or social conflicts over indigenous collective property rights in colonial and post-colonial settings, the journal editors aim to explore the limits of the usefulness of the concept of enclosure as a critical paradigm for understanding modern political and social life, and to consider how to connect its manifold manifestations.

While we would welcome submissions that revisit the early modern European context to which the term enclosure has typically been applied, we strongly encourage works from any time period, especially those that critically examine the broad applicability of the term and those that venture beyond the European and North American contexts.

The range of topics might include, but is not limited to, the following:

• Enclosure of the commons and the genesis of informal economies
• The historical roots of the privatized city
• Enclosure and the politics of population control
• The political and cultural uses of nostalgia for the “commons”
• Visual culture and the process of enclosure
• Environmental politics as part, or counterweight, to the process of enclosure
• Transnational historical perspectives on political and social movements such as Brazil’s and India’s respective anti-dam movements, or the struggle over the privatization of water in Bolivia
• Successful assertions of communal rights, for example in urban shantytowns and former runaway slave communities in the Americas: have they challenged the process of enclosure?
• Artistic, cinematic, or other cultural representations of enclosure and creative responses to it—for instance, in Agnès Varda’s cinéma verité classic, The Gleaners and I, or Britain’s punk and post-punk movements as aesthetic responses to Thatcher’s sweeping politics of privatization
• Enclosure and imperialism: what is the relationship between the domestic reapportioning of property rights and the possession of overseas territories? How can we connect the enclosure of the commons in the metropole to the fate of communally owned indigenous lands and other resources under colonial rule?
• The making of modern statecraft from the perspective of the “enclosers”: the surveyors, judges, and notaries who carried out the quotidian work of enclosure
• The politics of public space and the exclusionary “public sphere”
• Enclosure of the scientific commons and the commodification of knowledge
• The human genome as private property and the ownership of self
• The intellectual commons and radical approaches to intellectual and academic life
• Innovative uses of the cartographic and judicial records that enclosure left behind
• Critical reassessments of the classic works on enclosure, particularly E. P. Thompson and his cohort of Warwick School historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English agrarian society.

The RHR seeks scholarly research articles as well as such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, teaching notes and annotated course syllabi, and research notes.

Procedures for submission of articles:

By February 1, 2009, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish to include in this issue as an attachment to rhr@igc.org with “Issue 108 abstract submission” in the subject line. By March 1, 2009, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed drafts of articles is August 1, 2009. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 108 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Fall 2010. Articles should be submitted electronically with “Issue 108 submission” in the subject line. For artwork, please send images as high resolution digital files (each image as a separate file).

Abstract Submission Deadline: February 1, 2009 Email: rhr@igc.org

Radical History Review
rhr@igc.org
Email: rhr@igc.org
Visit the website at http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/calls.htm

CFP: City at War: ACLA 2009 Convention

ACLA 2009 Convention
March 26-29, 2009
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Seminar Organizers: Shawn C Doubiago, UC Davis; Susanne Hoelscher, U of San Francisco

The City at War

"The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism."
-Jean Baudrillard

This seminar explores how synthesizing notions of global cities, as expressed by Baudrillard, are disrupted by the violence of war. We invite interdisciplinary contributions that draw from a large array of genres and time periods to discuss the implications of destructive conflicts carried out on the body of the city and its inhabitants. In particular, we are interested in analyzing intersections of the spatial and social fabric in an urban environment under siege.
We seek to investigate how the aggression by external and/or internal forces disrupts and restructures urban spaces and communities, and how affected subjects react to the violations in their public and private spheres.
Topics might focus on:
- The City as Site of Contestations/Contested Sites in the City
- Victors? Claim to the City
- Penetration of Private and Public Realms
- Displacement
- Gendered Experiences
- Inner Cities and Ghettos
- Ethnic Conflicts and Colonization
- Divisions, Borders and Boundaries
- The City as Semiotic Field
- The City as Literary Figure
- The Razed City
- Topography and Architecture
- Conflicts in Historic Cities

Please submit paper proposals by Nov. 1, 2008 directly through the ACLA
website at: http://www.acla.org/acla2009/?page_id=7

Nowak on Poetry Foundation Blog

Xcp Editor, Mark Nowak has entered the blog-o-sphere.
He joins Alan Gilbert and others on the Poetry Foundation blog
HARRIET
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

CFP: "Motion in the City"

Call for articles

Website has issued a call for
articles on "Motion in the City".

Motion and process modify the urban environment and provide
fascinating scope for those interested in the field of urban studies.
Both repeated and routine motion are important in understanding the
functioning principles behind single urban localities and also whole
metropolitan regions. Migration, commuting, financial flows and the
flux of ideas. All these motions are the beats of the city and in
certain sense may be seen as the substance of the urban setting.
Motion can be evaluated from the perspectives of different academic
fields; many questions about the contemporary development of the city
reveal themselves. How has urban motion changed over the last decades?
What are the effects of technological innovation, in the field of
transport and the transfer of information, on the urban milieu? What
is the progress of intra-urban, internal and international migration
into cities? How do the different parts of a city differ in terms of
the rhythms and everyday motions of its population?

Please send us an e-mail with your proposal to slamak@natur.cuni.cz
(Martin Ourednícek) until 30th August 2008. Final submissions
should be sent to europeancity@mkc.cz (Ondrej Daniel) until 15th
September 2008.

All feature articles and case studies should be either in English,
Czech or Slovak.

Original articles should be between 4,000 and 5,000 words, whilst
critical definitions should not exceed 2,000 words. Both must be
written in Microsoft Word and submitted as either *.doc or *.rtf
files. Font: Times New Roman, size:12. Line spacing: 1.5. Margins: 2.5
cm top and bottom, 3 cm left and right. Do not insert page numbers.
All references should follow the Harvard system consisting of in-text
citations [e.g. (Castles 2003)] and a full bibliography (see bellow).
Footnotes should be limited, but if included should be placed at the
foot of each page. Do not forget to list bibliography at the end of
your text. Please be consistent in your bibliography format, e.g. as
follows:

MORGAN, P. (2004). From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh past
in the Romantic Period. In: E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, ed.: The
Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.
43-101.

MUSTERD, S. (2003). "Segregation and integration: A contested
relationship." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 29 (4):
623-641.

KERYK M. (2008): "The Church and Ukrainian Immigrants in Poland."
Available at http://www.migrationonline.cz/e-library/?x=2081309
[visited 28.3. 2008].

Please also provide the following:

- Brief annotation (4 sentences maximum) and a list of keywords (5-10
most relevant keywords)

- Full contact details for the author along with email address as well
as a brief biography (3 sentences maximum).

Please submit all images as separate files, in either *.jpg or *.tif
format with reference points indicated in the text.

Authors of feature articles and case studies chosen for publication
will receive remuneration for their contribution.

--
Ondrej Daniel
Website editor

www.evropskemesto.cz
www.europeancity.cz
tel./fax: (+420) 296 325 347
e-mail : europeancity@mkc.cz

CFP: The Fall 2008 issue of Interval(le)s

The Fall 2008 issue of Interval(le)s, the poetics journal from University of Liège, Belgium, will explore transcription in the humanities and social sciences.

As an aesthetic and methodological practice, transcription appears in many disciplines: poetry, anthropology, classics, performance studies, to name just a few. We seek scholarly papers and creative projects which discuss—or exemplify—particular uses of transcription. Possible topics and projects include: transcribed literary texts; transcribed anthropological fieldwork; transcribed autoethnographies; transcribed philosophical lectures.

By July 1, 2008, send your submission to Jon Cotner (j.cotner@rocketmail.com) and to Andy Fitch (professorfitch@yahoo.com). Papers/projects should follow the MLA format (if applicable) and use footnotes rather than endnotes (if necessary). Contact us in advance if your work exceeds 7,000 words, or if you have any questions. If you submit a transcription project, please provide a brief introductory note on its development.

Previous issues can be found online at: