It’s EVENTS’ time again!! From England, to The Netherlands, to Portugal, and all the way to Australia with a stop in Houston to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the historical 1977’s National Women’s Conference , this month, we’re all about art and activism! They tend to go naturally together, many have argued.
As always, if you want your event to feature in our next events list or if want to write a short report, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our events assistant Aude at audef@allegralaboratory.net.
Symposium: Drawing Conversations 2: Body, Space, Place
8 December 2017, Coventry University, England
Papers are invited for this one-day symposium intended to consider interrelationships of drawing, body, space and place. At the heart of this will be the body acting as the conduit between interior and exterior, private and public. Drawing in this sense can therefore be elastic in definition, from two-dimensional mark making, to more spatial languages that might involve capturing movement, three-dimensional drawing, or indeed understanding the processes of making the movement, mark or gesture. How do these gestures make meaning? What impulses from a particular space or place impelled the drawing? What is the relationship of the final work to a space or place?
Twenty-minute papers are invited from practitioners, historians and theoreticians. They can include projects undertaken, or be about particular works or ideas by others. [more]
Deadline for submission of paper proposals: 15 September 2017
Conference: Mapping the Emotional Cityspace: Spaces, Performances and Emotion in Urban Life
18 September, 2017, University of Adelaïde, Australia
Since Henri Lefebvre suggested that space is socially constructed and constituted, cities have been reclassified from static ‘maps’ for human activities to performed spaces that draw together human behaviour, meaning, discourse, and material conditions in their production. Cities are not simply a background for movement, but a function of cultural and emotional practice. That cities are named, given boundaries and called home – and in turn that cities name, define and give identity to their inhabitants – has equally implicated emotion in their production, as a recent turn to emotional geographies and urban emotions reminds us. This symposium seeks to contribute to this burgeoning scholarship through exploring the productive relationships between emotions and cityscapes across time and space.
We are particularly interested in the relationship between urban geographies, architectures, buildings, and materialities and emotion. How are neighbourhood boundaries produced through and with emotion? How do emotional communities form and define themselves through urban space? How does architecture and the physical environment inform social relationships and behaviours and vice versa? And how do the emotional imaginings of urban environments impact on their histories, identities and communities? Moreover, what are the implications of such emotional productions of the cityscape for relationships of power, identity and more within them? [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 June 2017
Conference: Art & Activism: Resilience Techniques in Times of Crisis
15-17 December 2017, Leiden, The Netherlands
The conference Art & Activism aims to understand the force of art to engage and express political sentiment. At the heart of any art that can be called activist is a firm revolutionary belief in the possibility of societies reforming and improving. Behind its obvious involvement with present issues and concerns, activist art is always oriented to shaping an ameliorated future. This public role is not uncontested. The arts are (perpetually) under attack. A sense of crisis, moreover, is widely felt among contemporary artists and activists, who experience precarity, marginalization, and vulnerability on a daily basis and may put their bodies on the line. The idea of crisis, both in the arts and in society, has been widely articulated by scholars and critics. This interdisciplinary conference aims to create a space in which participants from scholarly, artistic and activist backgrounds can learn from and collaborate on a horizontal plane. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 May 2017
International Conference: Invisible Republic: Music, Lettrism, Avant-Gardes
25-27 October 2017, University of Lisbon, Portugal
In Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), Greil Marcus charts a countercultural sound map, a kind of laboratory where a new language is being forged. This is where, Marcus argues, we can locate the true voice of the century, a new consciousness, the alchemy of an undiscovered country. From this starting-point, we propose a journey into the tangled relationship between music, the avant-gardes and counterculture. […]
The present conference aims at exploring and bringing to the fore the “invisible republics” of culture, the ephemeral, the suppressed, the unconformity of artistic and political undercurrents. Above all, it asks how these separate geographical territories speak to each other, and how this might reshape our historical understanding of European and American modernity. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 April 2017 (first CFP) and 25 May 2017 (2nd CFP)
Conference: 1977-2017: The IWY National Women’s Conference in retrospect
5-7 November 2017, University of Houston, Texas
This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the 1977 National Women’s Conference, the domestic answer to the United Nations’ International Women’s Year initiative. The Houston Conference, as it came to be known, was the largest federally mandated gathering of American women in history. On this occasion, 2000 delegates elected from fifty states and six territories and roughly 16,000 observers came together to craft a twenty-six plank National Plan of Action, submitted to President Jimmy Carter in 1978. The conference remains one of the most imaginative and wide-ranging exercises in civic engagement realized in the twentieth century, and we seek to draw attention to the diversity, ingenuity, and determination of participants who dared to dream up concrete policy goals of “what women want.” The recent global response to the Women’s March on Washington suggests just how much the issues debated at the Houston Conference still resonate.
During a three day conference, November 5-7, we aim to take stock of this momentous feat as well as consider the separate concerns articulated at a “pro-family” counter-convention held in Houston simultaneously. A scholarly academic symposium will coincide with a delegate and observer reunion. Commemorative activities will occur simultaneous to academic sessions and begin the prior weekend. In holding two events at once, we seek a cross-pollination of ideas and action, bringing together academics and activists, current and lifetime students and teachers, and those that remember being there alongside those who seek to carry the torch forward. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 July 2017
Featured image by Anne Ruthman (flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
