MCLC: Placing culture in urban China--cfp extension

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Placing culture in urban China–cfp extension
‘Placing’ culture in urban China:
Towards an interdisciplinary dialogue  
2 July 2015
University College London
Extended submission deadline: 1st June 2015
Response date: 5th June 2015  
Call for papers
As the Chinese city transforms, arts and culture are widely used instruments of regeneration and competitive place promotion, and serve as well in the struggle to upgrade from labour-intensive manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy. The distinctive spatial articulations of cultural production in the context of the transitional Chinese city are of critical interest to the ongoing retheorization of the role of cultural production in the twenty-first century city broadly, and point towards possible urban futures for a country in a dynamic state of cultural redefinition. But arts and culture are not just associated with regeneration; they may also be used to contest the meaning and identity of urban space, politicize questions of belonging, and/or resist the insistent displacement pressures that accompany accelerated urbanization. Within this context, the proliferating artistic and cultural expressions themselves are also integral to the understanding of emerging China and its alternative urban imaginaries. Against the backdrop of cultural globalization and the homogenizing tendencies of the Western art market and international media circuits, Chinese arts and culture reassert the significance of internal visions, historical trajectories and endogenous capabilities. From the nascent cultural idioms of contemporary China we can draw insights into the negotiation of a shifting cultural identity and its relationship to new urban forms, political projections of the socialist state, and palimpsestic inscriptions of tumultuous Chinese cultural history. We are convening a workshop that seeks to initiate a dialogue among postgraduates and early career researchers engaged in the explication of the reflexive relationship between culture and place in China from multiple disciplinary perspectives. We would like to invite six papers, each contributing to either or both of the following research orientations:
-The role of arts and culture in the transformation of urban space in contemporary China
-The representation and re-imagination of the urban in contemporary Chinese artistic and cultural expression
Furthermore, we encourage each participant to reflect on how interdisciplinary exchange can enrich these investigations. We hope that the workshop will strengthen research networks and inspire new and innovative perspectives and methodologies, and we intend to explore publication opportunities for a selection of the workshop’s papers. We are able to reimburse expenses of up to £80 to support the travel of postgraduates accepted from outside London. We are pleased to announce that Prof Chris Berry (KCL, Film Studies) and Dr Maurizio Marinelli (Sussex, History) will be in attendance to present recent research and discuss these themes. Additional invited speakers will be confirmed, and the full workshop programme announced, in early June.
To propose a paper, please send an abstract of no more than 200 words by June 1st to Murray Mckenzie (murray.mckenzie.14 at ucl.ac.uk) or Yixiang Sun (yixiang.sun.11 at ucl.ac.uk). Please also contact us with any other enquiries about the workshop. We do not require participants to submit written papers in advance. We intend to respond to all submissions by June 5th. https://placingcultureinurbanchina.wordpress.com/
by denton.2 at osu.edu on May 19, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20150519/74981a2e/attachment-0001.html>