6th Cosmobilities Conference 2010

Aalborg University, Denmark

Call for Papers

Cultures of Mobilities: Everyday life, Communication, and Politics

Abstract submissions are invited for the 'The Cultures of Mobilities: Everyday life, Communication, and Politics' conference, to be held in Aalborg, Denmark, on October 27-29 2010. The conference is open to students, scholars, and professionals from various fields interested in the theoretical or applied study of mobilities.

Different forms of mobilities have increased dramatically in recent decades and are today essential for many spheres of contemporary societies. In various research disciplines mobility is still often thought of as a matter of rational organization, an important competitive feature in a global world, or as a dominating stratifying factor. As such, mobility is immanently connected to material practices of movement and access - or its opposites. However, what is less discussed in the recent debates on mobility research is that mobilities are not just material, but also signifying practices. Mobilities have just as much to do with the production of meaning and culture. The 2010 ‘Cultures of Mobilities" conference therefore takes up the challenge to theorize and analyze mobilities from the vantage point of a cultural perspective. The conference suggests that mobilities are understood with a particular emphasis on how they produce and re-produce norms, meanings and cultures.

The conference focuses particularly on the perspective of ‘Cultures of Mobilities’ within 3 different themes: Everyday life, Communication and Politics. The Everyday life perspective considers how the organization of everyday life mobilities produces and re-produces particular sets of values and norms relating to mobilities? It explores the ways in which everyday life mobilities are being organized, and ask if they are giving birth to new social communities and perspectives on social interaction, or eroding social connectivity? The Communication perspective considers how new digital communication technologies influence mobility practices and how they may create affordance to particular ways of engaging with mobilities? This part may also involve intercultural/cross-cultural perspectives on mobility as well as representation of mobilities in for example, literature, media, documentary, cinema, computer games and fiction. Finally the Politics perspective addresses how the new mobilities are being perceived politically; Are the political perceptions particularly encouraging or discouraging particular forms of mobility? Are there specific norms and cultures related to the ways states and governmental systems create policies for mobilities? Under this theme, critical perspectives, ‘the environment’, ‘mobility as a right’ and power/social stratification at scales from the neighbourhood to global mega-regions, are also encouraged.

Authors are invited to send in abstracts of maximum 300 words within these themes; however contributions that moves beyond these themes may also be considered. The conference is jointly organised by the Centre for Mobility and Urban Studies (C-MUS) at Aalborg University, Denmark and the Cosmobilities Network. The registration process will open in February 2010. The conference registration fee is 165 EUR (for faculty and other professionals). Reduced rate for students: 80 EUR.

Contact: Ole B. Jensen obje@aod.aau.dk

 

Lancaster Sociology research students would like to invite other PhD students to our 4th intellectual party, to be held in the summer of 2010.

The summer conference, held on 28th - 29th June 2010, is a great opportunity to present your work at Lancaster, collaborate with other research students, and have a lot of fun. You will be able to join 'sociological challenges ' involving Andrew Sayer, Elizabeth Shove, John Urry, Tim Dant and others. You are also invited to stay on another day and join us on the 30th June for a sociological expedition to the world-famous Lake District. Come and share your research, and enjoy Lancaster Sociology's post-disciplinary atmosphere.

If you are interested in joining us and presenting a paper on your research, please visit

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/sociology/summerconference/

and send your abstract using the online form by the 25th January 2010. All subjects are welcome. The registration fee for non-Lancaster students is £65. This includes refreshments, dinner and lunches during the two day conference. If you have any queries please contact Kate McNicholas Smith - k.mcnicholassmith1(at)lancaster.ac.uk

We look forward to meeting you. Please remember to submit your abstract by 25th January!

The Summer Conference Committee

 

 

M/C - Media and Culture

is calling for contributors to the 'cohesion' issue of

M/C Journal 

Edited by Donna Hancox & Jaz Choi

Cohesion as a term connotes attraction, unity, and commonness amongst discrete entities. Considering cohesion as a concept is timely with the recent rise of network culture, which comes with both small and radical changes in how people connect with, position themselves in relation to,  and understand other constituents of society. The need to build bonds between human beings, and to bring together otherwise disparate experiences and aspirations is proving evermore crucial to a sustainable future for the world. But is the current and pervasive understanding of cohesion and its implicit promise of harmony or unity possible, or do we need to look for more nuanced and realistic ways to approach the idea of cohesion?

Anheier et al. have re-imagined Bourdieu's view of the positions individuals inhabit within social spaces as a 'network, or a  configuration, of objective relations among positions' (Anheier, et al., 1995).  From  this view the merging of individuals or groups into a cohesive whole becomes less important than the coming together, sometimes only briefly, of ideas into a dynamic and complicated matrix. This is not necessarily to question the obvious advantages of a unified society, rather we seek to ask our contributors if there are new ways of approaching cohesion, and what are the implications for the various disciplines.

Similar observations can be made from the technological perspective. Embedded in everyday life, network technologies engender and accentuate multiplicities: multifaceted self-identity, multitasking, and multisensorial experience via multimedia, for example. As we fast transition from the current network era towards that of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), our social and technological systems and practices become modular-like (Choi, et al., 2009), resonating with what Stone calls 'continuous partial attention' (2006). In this environment, it is cohesion that validates a networked entity by giving it a unified form and/or voice amongst its distributed constituents.

In this issue of M/C Journal, we seek a cohesive understanding of cohesion across disciplines on wide-ranging issues such as the meaning of cohesion, how we understand cohesion, and what we can do with our understanding of cohesion.

Please send a 100-word abstract to the editors at cohesion@journal.media-culture.org.au. Articles of 3,000 words in length should be submitted online and should be prepared in accordance with the M/C Journal style guidelines.

Article deadline:     22 Jan. 2010

Issue release date:   24 Mar. 2010

M/C Journal was founded (as "M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture") in  1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting  of media and culture. Contributors are directed to past issues of M/C Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page for comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are  blind peer-reviewed. 

The East Asia Forum is a refereed multi-disciplinary journal published annually by the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.

With contributions from graduate students the world over, the EAF enjoys a reputation for producing original graduate-level research that is at the forefront of the field of East Asian Studies.

We are currently seeking original academic papers surrounding the topic of ‘desire’, which address the many ways in which desires are produced, structured, regulated, and mobilized through various institutions and discursive formations. We encourage submissions from graduate students in all disciplines within and beyond the field of East Asian Studies, including history, sociology, anthropology, economics, art history, literature, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Possible topics for papers include:

    •    theories of desire and their complications in the East Asian context
    •    literary and cultural representations and mediations of desire
    •    the mobilization of desire within art and cinema
    •    intersections of nationalism, identity, and desire
    •    the interplay of desire with capitalism, socialism, and commodity culture
    •    gender and sexuality
    •    the construction of East Asia as a space of fantasy, and its consequent structuring as object of desire

Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Studies, whose aim is to promote interdisciplinary research relating to East Asia while encouraging a cross-regional approach, the EAF seeks submissions that strive to go beyond the cultural idioms traditionally used in discussions of East Asia.

All contributions are peer-reviewed and are subject to final approval by the editorial committee. The deadline for submissions is April 5, 2010, which can be directed to eaf@asiapacificreader.org, along with any other questions.

Please consult the section Notes to Contributors for stylistic and submission requirements.

The 1st Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network Conference: Tourism and Seductions of Difference will take place in Lisbon, Portugal from 10 to 12 September 2010. The Conference builds on previous events organised by the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University and will mark the establishment of the Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network as an international group of university researchers interested in critical tourism research. It will also bring a long established tradition in tourism anthropology research at the Portuguese Network Centre for Anthropological Research, CRIA to a wider international audience. The conference is to become an annual series hosted by members of the Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network or by the annual conferences of professional academic associations. 

As tourism research spreads into the social sciences, the aim of this series is to bring together social scientists studying tourism and related social phenomena from different disciplinary perspectives. We wish to discuss and ‘test’ the theoretical premises of foundational texts in tourism studies and to develop ongoing critique and new ideas. We welcome papers both from established academics re-assessing their work in the light of current theoretical developments in the social sciences and from an emergent generation of academics presenting their research outputs. Tourism and Seductions of Difference, the theme of the 2010 Conference in Lisbon, Portugal addresses key issues and theoretical perspectives which have left their mark on tourism research over recent years.  

Themes

Ontologies of seduction: boundaries, differences, separations, times, others

Formations of seduction: social assemblages, contact cultures, attractions

Fields of seduction: gender, houses, heritages, nations, territories, classes

Mediums of seduction: texts, bodies, arts, architectures, foods and natures

Techniques of seduction: performance, flirtation, enticement, friendship, magic, concealment

Emotions of seduction: temptations, transgressions, ingestions, emancipations

Threats of seduction: spoliation, contamination, exclusion, death, degradation

Politics of seduction: hospitality, containment, kinship, power

Moralities of seduction: obligations, reciprocity, co-habitation

Consequences of seduction: mobilities, cosmopolitanisms, world society

Academic Committee 
David Picard, Maria Cardeira, Simone Abram, Mike Robinson, Saskia Cousin, Nelson Graburn, Maki Tanaka, Noel B. Salazar, Mathis Stocks, Pamila Gupta, Naomi Leite, Camila del Marmol, Ramona Lenz, Chiara Cipollari, Sanja Kalapos Gasparac, Britt Kramvig, Ester Võsu, Margaret Hard, Michael A. Di Giovine, Kenneth Little. 

Call for papers 
To propose a paper, please send a 250 word abstract including title and full contact details to tourismcontactculture@gmail.com. The Call for Papers for this event will initially be open until 20 March 2010. Late abstracts may be considered.