The Metropole digs symposiums. Who doesn’t? Recently, the Global Urban Humanities Initiative (a joint venture between the UC Berkeley Arts & Humanities Division of the College of Letters & Science and the College of Environmental Design) contacted the UHA about its upcoming two day symposium: Techniques of Memory: Landscape, Iconoclasm, Medium, and Power. Needless to say, we see plenty of opportunity for urbanists so check out the CFP below!
CFSAAA – Call for Scholars, Artists, Architects and Activists
Techniques of Memory
Landscape, Iconoclasm, Medium and Power
Before WWII Robert Musil famously claimed that there was nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. Musil, alongside critics like Lewis Mumford, was determined to disclose the inability of the monument to adapt itself to modern times. Yet, recent events in Charlottesville, and New Orleans are only one of many signs that Musil might have been mistaken: monuments and memorials can be easily awakened to cause local politics and streets to burst into flames. While old monuments are falling, new memorials get erected at heightened speed. The distance between an injustice, tragedy, or deed, and its memorialization seems to be rapidly decreasing.
The groundbreaking literature on the field of memorialization, which includes classics like Maurice Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory, Pierre Nora’s Liex de Memoire, James Young’s The Texture of Memory, Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories, _________dealt with a historical phenomenon rooted in the 80s and heightened by anxieties about the new millennium. Almost two decades later its seems pressing to reassess the role that memory and its physical manifestations –memorials, monuments, plaques, calendars, photographs, xxx– play in our contemporary world. The 2019 Global Urban Humanities conference, Techniques of Memory, invites scholars, artists, architects, and activists to submit abstracts that analyze memorialization as a historical phenomenon, discuss the contemporary role of memorials, and examine the changing role of memory in diverse geographical areas and historical periods.
The Global Urban Humanities Initiative is a joint venture between the UC Berkeley Arts & Humanities Division of the College of Letters & Science and the College of Environmental Design. Thanks to the vision and support of the Mellon Foundation, it brings together scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, city and regional planning, and multiple humanities disciplines – ranging from comparative literature and history of art, to theater, dance and performance studies. Together, faculty and graduate students are developing new theoretical paradigms, research methods, and pedagogical approaches in order to help address the complex problems facing today’s global cities and regions.
Techniques of Memory: Landscape, Iconoclasm, Medium and Power will be a two-day symposium organized by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley, from April 17th to 18th 2019 at the Brower Center in Downtown Berkeley. Following the principles of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, our symposium seeks to bring together not only scholars, but practitioners, activists and artist to think about monuments, memorial landscapes, iconoclasm, mediums and materiality, as well as memory politics and power from the unique interdisciplinary standpoint that this platform provides. The symposium will consist of four panels: Landscape, Iconoclasm, Medium and Power. We ask submissions to reference which of the four panels they would like to be considered for:
- Landscape: Contributions that engage with what could be largely defined as memorial landscapes: geographies of memory, geopolitics of memorials, as well as memorials in specific social and cultural contexts. Design interventions, scholarly examinations, activism projects and community appropriation examples are all encouraged to participate.
- Iconoclasm: Contributions that engage with the destruction, removal, intervention, mobility and stasis, re-appropriation, and re-signification of monuments and memorials. Scholarly contributions, architectural designs, artistic interventions, performance works and new media approaches are encouraged to participate.
- Medium: Contributions that examine the materiality, production, and labor of memory and memorials. Scholarly contributions, architectural designs, artistic interventions, performance works and new media approaches are encouraged to participate.
- Power: Contributions that engage with politics and institutions of memory, race and memory, gender and memory, debates around postcolonial memorialization, as well as struggles for recognition and reparation. Design interventions, scholarly examinations, activism projects and community appropriation examples are all encouraged to participate.
Additionally, keynote speakers Austin Allen (New Orleans), Jason Berry (New Orleans), Lauren Kroiz (Berkeley), Marita Sturken (New York), Hans van Houwelingen (Amsterdam), will each contribute to one of the four themes of the conference and will serve as respondents to the delivered papers.
Submissions should include the following:
– Contact information (name and email)
– Institutional affiliation and/or address
– Title of contribution
– Type of contribution (paper, performance, artist talk, design talk)
– Preferred panel (landscape, iconoclasm, medium or power)
– Abstract (300 words)
– CV (no more than 4 pages)
Selected papers will be supported to present their contributions at the symposium with $800 for travel and lodging expenses for presenters from outside California, and $400 for presenters travelling from within California.
The deadline for submissions is December 20th, 2018.
Sincerely,
Symposium Organizing Committee:
Susan Moffat – Global Urban Humanities Project Director,
Anna Brand – Landscape Architecture Department;
Sarah Hwang – Global Urban Humanities Program coordinator,
Valentina Rozas-Krause – Architecture Department
Andrew Shanken –Architecture Department;
Bryan Wagner – English Department
The Metropole 