[ecrea] CFP "Mediterranean Encounters in the City"

>CALL FOR PAPERS: MEDITERRANEAN ENCOUNTERS IN THE CITY
>
>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 todays 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 October 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.
>
>
>
>**************************************************
>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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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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New Book:
Trans-Reality Television
The Transgression of Reality, Genre, Politics, and Audience.
Lexington. (Sofie Van Bauwel & Nico Carpentier eds.)
http://www.lexingtonbooks.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0739131885
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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