[Commlist] Post-Pandemic Imaginaries CFP

*Post-Pandemic Imaginaries Space, Culture and Memory after Lockdown*

A two-day conference on the 5th and 6th September 2024

Organised by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life at the School of 
the Arts, University of Liverpool, UK

*Keynote speakers:*

*Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University)*

Stef is Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he 
directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. He has authored or 
edited numerous books, special journal issues and articles on trauma, 
memory, climate change and eco-emotions as mediated through culture.

*Professor Dawn Lyon (University of Kent)*

Dawn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. She has 
published widely on the sociology of work, time and everyday life. Her 
recent research includes analysis of accounts of everyday life collected 
by Mass Observation during the Covid-19 Pandemic, attending to rhythm 
and future imagining.

*Call for Papers*

The Centre for Culture and Everyday Life (CCEL) invites contributions to 
a two-day interdisciplinary conference exploring changes in the 
experience and imagining of everyday urban spaces following the COVID-19 
pandemic. The aim of the conference is to focus critical attention not 
on the impact of the pandemic and associated government lockdowns, but 
on the processes of reimagining, remembering and remapping of everyday 
culture and experience through a post-pandemic lens.

A key focus of enquiry are the real-and-imaginary geographies of 
everyday experiences under lockdown where the imagination was put to 
work in ways that often elicited heterotopic glimpses of a post-pandemic 
world that may, in the years since, have all but slipped into oblivion. 
During lockdown, the ‘spatial play’ (Marin 1984) of the utopic 
imagination – the interplay of horizons and frontiers as negotiated 
through forms of everyday social and spatial practice – was galvanised 
by a collective experience of space and time that transformed the 
affective contours of everyday living. As physical movements and 
interactions were compressed into the individualised landscapes of 
lockdown, alternative, virtual forms of social and spatial relationships 
were brought into play. Whether by ensconcing oneself in virtual spaces 
or by venturing anew into the suddenly depopulated landscapes of local 
urban neighbourhoods, reconfigured forms of individual spatial agency 
brought with them a corresponding reconfiguring of the everyday urban 
imaginary.

For some, dystopian scenarios familiar from literature and film were 
offset by small utopian moments: the impulse of planners and city 
councils to take the opportunity to engage citizens in reimagining urban 
space, moments of community and togetherness amid the enforced 
separations, an absence of traffic noise and pollution, and newly 
audible birdsong. Videos shared online that showed wild animals roaming 
the streets, and even memes ridiculing the notion that “nature is 
healing”, may have even offered some momentary respite from ongoing 
climate anxiety. While for many people, confinement could be experienced 
as chaotic, overcrowded, and made work-time almost endless, for others 
it opened up time to reflect, and to pause, to imagine how their lives 
might be otherwise.

If there was a utopian impulse amid the terrors of the pandemic, what 
did it look like, and what traces remain? Is there an ethical and 
aesthetic imperative to salvage the residual glimpses, fragments, dreams 
and imaginaries engendered by the pandemic? In what ways, if any, did 
the projected imaginings of post-pandemic urban futures contribute to 
substantive changes that are discernible now, four years on? How are the 
lived spaces and temporalities of cities qualitatively different today 
from what they were in 2019? Are they different or was it all just a 
blip? What traces of pandemic behaviour and experience remain in our 
daily interactions? Has the pandemic brought about a keener awareness 
and value of the local? How did art and photography respond to the 
temporary transformation of public and social space? How have forms of 
everyday mobility changed? Are there post-pandemic spatial stories that 
reveal a transformation in how people engage with and imagine everyday 
urban spaces? And if there are, what do these spatial stories look like? 
What do they say and how might they be traced or mapped? What does 
re-engaging the everyday mean in a post-pandemic world?

We welcome proposals addressing these issues from scholars at all career 
stages and a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds.

Abstract Submission: Please send abstracts (300 words max.) with your 
name, title, affiliation (where appropriate) and a short bio (up to 200 
words). Please prepare for a 20 minute presentation

by 10 May 2024 to the conference organizers: 
(CCELconference2024 /at/ liverpool.ac.uk)

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 7th June 2024

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