[ecrea] CFP - Urban Matters: Material Engagements with Communities and Borders in Times of Movement

*CALL FOR PAPERS

Urban Matters: Material Engagements with Communities and Borders in 
Times of Movement

9th Annual Conference on the New Materialisms
&
Research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World

Utrecht University, the Netherlands
June 20-22, 2018*


New materialist scholarship has in the last decade taken flight, and 
interesting connections have been found and produced between new 
materialisms, medical and environmental humanities, and science and 
technology studies. These innovations notwithstanding, the new 
materialisms have left untouched important theoretical debates and 
societally relevant areas of study. This has led to critiques of new 
materialisms’ empirical applicability and political value, and to the 
question: how do the material turns of ‘new materialisms’ and of 
‘material approaches’ in fields such as media and cultural studies and 
anthropology converge and diverge? Scholarship under the heading of ‘new 
materialisms’ can be strengthened by bringing it more explicitly into 
contact with Humanities and Social-Science research on matter and 
materiality. Practices of world-making, from religion to the 
(performing) arts, have been approached as ways to inquire into 
affective and socio-material assemblages from which emerging emotions 
and imaginaries have been articulated. Affective and socio-material 
assemblages give new insights into the ways in which every-day and 
artistic practices, alongside political, economic, and scientific 
practices, generate and rework not only structural in- and exclusions, 
but also seemingly immaterial things such as meaning, belief, and 
emotion. Communities and borders in pluriform cities in Europe and 
beyond provide a particularly fertile ground for experimenting with 
these interactions and for working towards an inclusive ‘material turn.’

As we are moving into an Urban Age in which the majority of the world 
population lives in cities, questions of co-existence increasingly have 
to be thought in relation to high density, proximity and heterogeneity. 
This urban condition brings to the forefront the question how 
superdiversity is maintained and reproduced in relation to the built 
environment and technologies of mediation. Interventions in the field of 
urban studies suggest to approach this question by means of an 
‘infrastructural’ perspective that understands the reproduction of 
social life in terms of socio-material assemblages that shape the fabric 
of urban life. This infrastructural understanding of the city offers us 
a concrete example of the empirical applicability and political value of 
new materialisms, and also a concrete domain where different material 
traditions can be investigated more closely. Important questions, for 
instance, are how different religious practices with their own 
material-semiotic ideologies inform lay and scholarly perceptions of the 
urban environment and how these perceptions influence the production of 
borders and communities and the possibilities of co-existence. Another 
set of questions concerns the processes through which religion 
materializes in concrete forms – through architecture and material 
culture - in urban spaces, thereby rendering the beyond to which 
religion refers tangible. Important questions concern how the ways in 
which religions took place in the past shape urban religious 
environments in which religious newcomers nestle, as well as how 
different religious traditions and their religious matters relate to 
each other in our time.

The conveners of Urban Matters invite abstracts for papers and panels on 
the theme of Material Engagements with Communities and Borders in Times 
of Movement and on the new materialisms in relation to other material 
approaches. We invite proposals on topics including (but not limited to):

• Genealogies of ‘material turns’ in philosophical thought and political 
theory, and across the Humanities and the Social Sciences
• Convergences and divergences of ‘new materialisms’ and ‘material 
approaches’ such as material culture studies, media ecology and 
(performing) arts as a material practice, and the study of religion from 
a material angle
• Methodological reflections on studying affective and socio-material 
assemblages and practices of world-making
• Understanding movement and ideology, and communities and borders in 
today’s cities from a material perspective

Proposals are to be submitted to (urbanmatters /at/ uu.nl) 
<mailto:(urbanmatters /at/ uu.nl)> and are due by January 15, 2018. Presenters 
will be notified by February 15, 2018.

For all information about the conference please visit our website 
at: https://urbanmatters.sites.uu.nl

***

This conference is a follow-up event of COST Action IS1307 New 
Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter comes to 
Matter’ (http://newmaterialism.eu/) and is sponsored by
• Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and 
the Humanities (https://www.uu.nl/en/descartes-centre)
• Research program Religious Matters in an Entangled 
World (https://www.religiousmatters.nl/about/)
• Research focus area Cultures, Citizenship, and Human Rights 
(http://cchr.uu.nl/)



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