[Commlist] CFP: Urban Mediations

*

*Urban Mediations: International Conference on the Narratives, 
Ecologies, and Poetics of the City (Hong Kong, 5-6 December 2024)*

**

*City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, 5 December 2024*

*The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, 6 December 2024*

**

This international, interdisciplinary conference aims to uncover 
emergent frameworks and methods for the interpretation and analysis of 
literary, filmic, and cultural texts relating to the profound 
transformation of cities around the world across the 19th, 20th, and 
21st centuries.

Our starting point for discussion is cities in Asia and their dialogues 
with different cities in the world. While “urban” typically denotes a 
geographical location and its inhabitants, we use it to indicate a 
process and practice of co-existence. The urban, in this sense, is 
informed by socio-cultural, economic, ecological, political, and 
technological processes that may appear or aspire to be global but that 
are, in fact, diversely lived and experienced.

The framework “urban mediations” offers a way of thinking about "the 
urban” not as a bounded, stable object, but as an intermediary agency 
that is both specific to a particular milieu and connected to people and 
processes elsewhere. “Mediation” extends recent work on urban 
infrastructure – the physical systems of connectivity that keep cities 
moving – to include the social, affective, aesthetic, and material 
relations that bind the urban to itself and to myriad elsewheres. For 
Lauren Berlant (2022: 22), infrastructure “is another way of talking 
about mediation—but always as a material process of binding, never 
merely as a material technology, aesthetic genre, form, or norm that 
achieves something.” Like the urban, mediation “is not a stable thing 
but a way of seeing the unstable relations among dynamically related 
things.”

Asia is a rich, highly diverse region that can be used as a focal point 
for exploring the uneven, often unpredictable mediations that constitute 
urban life. Many of the cities in the region emerged, or were shaped by, 
what Lasse Heerten (2021:351) describes as the “first globalisation in 
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…the heyday of colonial 
Empire and steam technologies.” The enhanced interconnectivity, 
especially since the nineteenth century, has contributed to the 
circulation of things, objects, ideas, and, for Su Lin Lewis (2016:140), 
the formation of the “cosmopolitan publics” and “print-worlds,” which 
often intersect with those that exist in cities and regions in different 
parts of the world in both physical and symbolic terms. The 
contradictions, tension, and the co-existence of opportunities and 
challenges in cities have become sources of inspiration for writers and 
artists across the world and historical periods to represent, reveal, 
and respond to different topical issues and conflicts.

Scholarship on Asian cities tends to be framed within a discourse of 
economic development. On the one hand, studies have highlighted how 
cities in the region have been and will become key drivers of economic 
growth in our urban future, with Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, 
Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore as long-standing economic hubs and 
emerging cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Jakarta, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh 
City, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi as sites of more recent investment and 
development. On the other hand, many of these same cities are challenged 
by issues of overdevelopment, such as congestion, pollution, 
overcapacity, hyperinflation, extreme weather, aging populations, and 
shifting demographics.

Other scholars, such as Abdoulmaliq Simone (2004, 2010, 2022), Asef 
Bayat (2000,2013), Ravi Sundaram (2009), and Ara Wilson (2016), have 
written about how informality in urban environments affords agency to 
urban residents who are dispossessed of resources and livelihoods 
because of poverty or displacement. Divested of access to suitable 
infrastructures because of government corruption or ineptness, 
residents, across different historical and social contexts, have 
explored ways to improvise, poach, or hack obsolete or damaged 
technologies by collaborating with each other. These creative practices 
of inhabiting the city have been echoed in the work of writers, 
filmmakers, architects, and artists who have experimented with new forms 
of collaboration, aesthetics, and community within and across cities for 
the past two centuries.

As such, issues relating to urban environments, in Asia and elsewhere, 
are not simply issues of policy planning and resource management but 
require new ideas from the arts and humanities to comprehend the 
epistemological, cultural, and ecological impact of rapid urban changes. 
We hope that by exchanging thoughts and asking questions together we can 
develop new critical and creative frameworks that engage with different 
historical moments, address the challenges facing our urban futures, and 
shed light on the possibilities and practices that exist within the present.

Interdisciplinary in focus, our conference invites participants from 
both the humanities and social sciences working with texts and practices 
across historical periods and cultural contexts, from a diversity of 
disciplines and subfields including literature, film and media studies, 
architecture, geography, urban studies, gender studies, and 
anthropology. Participants interested in exploring intersections with 
gender, race, indigeneity; migration and the circulation of things, 
cultural texts, ideas, people, information; climate, ecology, and the 
nonhuman; and Asian urban practices and poetics are especially welcome.

We are looking for papers that address the following questions:

  * How might literary works, film, architecture, and other poetic
    practices mediate, negotiate, or interrogate urban relations and the
    built environment?
  * How can creative and critical practices reveal, mediate, or
    challenge various forms of inequalities and respond to questions
    surrounding gender, race, religion, class, labour, and humans’
    relationship with animals and nature?
  * How can microhistories of cities, municipalities, districts, and
    neighborhoods offer a more nuanced view of specific milieux or
    challenge grand narratives of development and globalisation?
  * In what ways do cities narrate themselves? What stories can be read
    in the topography, design, and composition of their built environments?
  * How do imagination and memory shape and mediate the urban
    experience, or re-create the materiality of the cityscape?
  * How have colonialism’s cultural and historical legacies shaped the
    urban form and the environmental conditions of cities?
  * How might “archipelagic thinking” reconfigure how we imagine urban
    regions characterised by city clusters or interconnected
    metropolitan centres?
  * How do imaginaries of failed or fragile infrastructures reveal
    fissures in a world system built on the uninterrupted flow of
    capital, bodies, and goods?
  * How might an expanded understanding of infrastructure – not simply
    as a physical system of connectivity and flow but as the affective,
    aesthetic, and material relations that bind together social life –
    enable new conceptualisations of the urban?
  * How might feminist and queer literatures, films, and artistic works
    challenge the masculinist and heteronormative assumptions inherent
    in dominant frameworks of migration, economic development, and the
    urban?
  * How might we rethink our participation in the technological
    assemblages that comprise urban life and that mediate our access to
    the city, to other inhabitants, and to places elsewhere?

Kindly send a proposal with a 400-500-word abstract and a one-page CV to 
(urbanmediations24 /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(urbanmediations24 /at/ gmail.com)> by 15 
May 2024. As the goal is to produce an edited volume, accepted papers 
are expected to represent new, unpublished work.

The final session on day 2 will involve 3 parallel workshops to be led 
by discussants on emergent topics about urban mediations open to early 
career scholars.

An optional walking tour of sites in Hong Kong will be organized on 7 
December. Please check the conference website 
(https://urbannarrativesnetwork.com/urban-mediations-2024/) for updates 
on the workshops and the walking tour.

This conference is co-organized by City University of Hong Kong, 
Department of English; The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), 
Research Institute for the Humanities, Centre for Cultural Studies & MA 
in Intercultural Studies Programme, Departments of English and Cultural 
and Religious Studies; University of Hong Kong, Center for the Study of 
Globalization and Cultures in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Conference convenors

Elmo Gonzaga (CUHK)

Klaudia Lee (CityU)

Joanna Mansbridge (CUHK)

Alvin K. Wong (HKU)



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