8th – 10th February 2024
Eichstätt, Germany
The graduate school ‘Practicing Place: Socio-Cultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations’ at KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt researches the intersections, tensions, and dynamics of place and practice within a decidedly interdisciplinary collaboration. The local and translocal flows that constitute our everyday are simultaneously sustained, processed and disrupted by places. Places are sites of ongoing struggles and contestations, can not only consolidate but always also challenge the taken-for-granted and are themselves characterized by competing materialities, temporalities, allocations, exclusionary effects, and diverse and contradictory narratives, discourses and imaginaries. The goal of the training group is to unpick the ‘how’ of places in relation to the situatedness of any and all practices.
To conclude the first three years of research collaboration we would like to invite lecture proposals to our conference Practices of Imagination – Placings of Imaginaries, which is dedicated to an exploration of the situatedness, locality, placedness and site- specificity of practices of imagining and cultural imaginaries. Imagining is usually seen as something that individual subjects do on their own and that is located in the blackbox of the individual’s mind – secretive and placeless. The conceptual focus of our conference seeks to challenge this assumption, and encourages explorations of alternative approaches. Examining the notions of place and placelessness that imaginaries incite (in works such as The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, and Rob Shields’ Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity), we aim to look at practices of imagination as shared activities, foregrounding their connection to place-making practices (e.g. in storytelling, protesting, playing, designing, etc.). We invite contributions that reflect on practices of imagination from a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective, as materially bound routinized bodily performances which are simultaneously mental activities.
Daydreaming in the shower, designing a memorial site, betting on the outcome of a game, protesting for the dream of a carbon neutral society by not attending school on Fridays: (Re)Imagining affords a body to act in and together with a material world, is generally performed publicly and with others, made accountable and, therefore, observable, and is shaped by and shapes the culture that surrounds it. Imagining, therefore, seems to always be placed somewhere specifically rather than anywhere and to relate bodies to things and ideas as well as bodies to other bodies, ideas to other ideas, and things to other things. As a practice of its own as well as an integral and crucial part of many other practices, we ask, does not imagining have its subjects rather than the other way around?
Themes and topics for panels and presentations might include, but are not limited to:
• (Non-)visual images
• Media and Imagination
• Imagining in Games and Play
• Writing, Literature and Possible Worlds
• Imagining Futures
• Cultural and Collective Imaginaries
• Imaginations of the Public Sphere
• Nations and Imaginations
• Mapping and Imagining the Urban
• Bodies and Imaginaries /Embodying the Imaginary
• Ontologies and Epistemologies of Imagining and Ideas
• Geographical Imaginations
• The “Real” and the “Imaginary”
We welcome individual and group presentations (such as panels, roundtables and other formats). Group presentations should not exceed 4 people per panel.
Call for posters: Posters offer the opportunity to present the most important aspect of a project, highlight specific research findings, and discuss work in progress. Authors are expected to present their poster during a poster session. A poster may cover any of the topics of the conference. Posters will be on display for the duration of the conference. Format: DIN A0 (841mm wide x 1189mm high)
The conference will take place on the 8th, 9th and 10th of February 2024, hosted by the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, in Eichstätt, Germany. There will be a pre-conference dinner on the 7th of February in Eichstätt.
The conference language is English. We plan subsequent publication(s).
This is an in-person event.
Please submit, as a single document, abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short CV to conference_pp@ku.de by 31st of August 2023.
If you have any questions, please contact conference_pp@ku.de
For more information about ‘Practicing Place Socio-Cultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations’ please visit us at https://www.practicing.place/
Follow us in social media: Instagram @grako_practicingplace; Twitter: @GrakoPlace