Eyes on the City 2006 Conference of the International Visual Sociology Association July 3, 4, 5 University of Urbino Carlo Bo Urbino, Italy
IVSA 2006 SESSION PROPOSALS Papers can be submitted from February 15, 2006 to March 31, 2006 <http://www.visualsociology.org/proposals.html>http://www.visualsociology.org/proposals.html TOPIC RELATED SESSIONS The following sessions are related to the conference theme. Urban Cinematic Landscapes Renegotiating the Image of the City Chairs: Stavros Alifragkis (UK) and Ben Baruch Blich (IL) The purpose of the session is to examine the city as a metaphor in the cinema. What were the reasons for recruiting the city in the cinema, were there ideological reasons for incorporating the city to the cinema, or were there only entertaining reasons for the use of urban environments in the cinema. Filmmakers have directly or indirectly composed visual poems representing the dynamics of an emerging new era in urban environments. These productions renegotiated the age-old mythology of cities in the novel context of modernity. An illustrative example of such celebrated urban cinematic symphony would be Dziga Vertov's film Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929), which provided an understanding of life in five Russian cities, while simultaneously projecting the cinematic image of the ideal socialist city of the future. Similar films might include Ruttmann's Berlin symphony of a great city 1927; Lang's Metropolis 1927; Cooper & Schoedsack's King Kong 1933), Akerman's News from home 1970; Scott's Blade Runner 1982; Besson's Fifth element 1997). The aim of this session is to examine the transformations that the urban imaginary has undergone in its various cinematic reconstructions. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Stavros Alifragkis, Digital Studio, University of Cambridge or <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Ben Baruch Blich , Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem Visualizing Urban Living, Leisure and Consumption Chairs: Roberta Bartoletti (IT) and Giovanni Boccia Artieri (IT) This session focuses on research methodologies aimed at visualizing practices and everyday life in urban scapes (sociology with images) with a specific focus on leisure and consumption. In general terms, visualization is considered to be a useful technique in the self-observation of the meaning of everyday life practices, in particular with vernacular image making like snapshots or photovoice projects. This technique can also be utilized for photo elicitation during individual interviews or focus groups. The aim of this panel is to solicit papers reporting on research employing these methods in studies of consumption and leisure practices to assess both the adequacy of the method and the issues investigated. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Roberta Bartoletti and <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Giovanni Boccia-Artieri Facoltà di Sociologia, Università di Urbino The Cultural Consecration of Urban Places Chairs: Michael Borer (US) and Dee Britton (US) People are drawn to urban spaces where cultural narratives play an important role in defining a citys character and identity. Such consecrated places can help remind people not only who they are, but why who they are is important. Acts of cultural consecration vary as much as the places people care about and revere, ranging from traditional religious sites (e.g., churches, synagogues, mosques) and civic religious monuments to sports arenas and local taverns. Similarly, public art memorials purport to represent a consensual understanding of historical ruptures. Many societies memorial landscapes reflect significant war achievements and victories. Typically, the victors create war memorials; as a result, the status quo is invariably supported in war memorials. Moreover, the majority of public art projects are determined and funded by those representing the status quo. There are emerging demands of the creation of public memorials that arise from positions of victimization. Papers for this panel should show, through analysis and visual support, both consecrated urban places, and how societies cope with demands from those representing victims. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Dee Britton, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Colgate University. or <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Michael Borer, Department of Sociology, Furman University The Public-Private Debate in the Visual City Chairs: Diane Soles (US) and Berry Brent (CAN) Visual technology from films to cell phone cameras have challenged and blurred the divide between the private world of the home and public world of the street. Yet sociological theories of civil society remain predicated on the solidity of the public-private dichotomy. On one hand, critical theories, such as Habermass public sphere, place civil society in the private realm. On the other hand, feminist scholars conceive of civil society as part of the public realm. This glaring disparity remains unresolved in contemporary sociological theory. How can the use of visual data inform this debate? Signage is an important component of urban spaces reflecting the desire and ability of actors at all levels of society to communicate their interests. The visual economy of signage is sociologically insightful not just because it suggests how various interests, from graffiti writers to community groups or multinational corporations, compete for visual attention, but also for what it suggests about priorities for how we use our time and money. This session welcomes all projects about the visual order of public spaces. In what ways do advertising billboards, photographs and personal videos, or even feature films or documentaries of city life reinforce, subvert or re-shape our understandings of the public and private? Further, how does the meaning of the data change with the setting (public/private) in which it is viewed? This session seeks to introduce visual data into this theoretical impasse. Studies of public billboard advertising, photographs, films and other images are welcome. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Diane Soles, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice University of Wisconsin and <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Berry Brent, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Representing Urban Space in the Print Media Chair: Marco Capovilla (IT) Yannis Scarpelos (GR) Pelin Tan (TR) and Ozlem Unsal (UK) Urban marketing and the way it manufactures 'new urban imaginaries' for places is a vital trans-local issue. Contemporary times are witnessing the commodification of urban spaces through their social and physical deconstruction, which in the end give way to their 'beautification', labelling, marketing and consumption. Our visual knowledge of most cities and places is based on printed images. The rules upon which urban representations are based are at best, taken-for-granted and at worst, overlooked. This is achieved, sometimes, by activating a double procedure of de-contextualization of existing city images (to the extend of even forgeting the existence of the photographer) and re-contextualization in a quite different, nostalgic tone, concurent with political and ideological shifts. While architectural and specialized publications tend to follow precise rules on how buildings should be depicted, other printed media are more casual on which principles to adopt, leading to less standardized representations. This session solicits contributions on the sociological, anthropological, cultural and cognitive understanding of city images as part of the culture-led urban regeneration, marketing and gentrification strategies; seeking in the same time the a potential for "unorthodox" views of the buildings and the city, along with its connection to social, political and ideological trends. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Marco Capovilla, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Yannis Scarpelos, Dept. of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University; <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Pelin Tan, Dept. of Art History , Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul Technical University; <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Ozlem Unsal, Dept. of Sociology, City University -London Urban Identity and the Challenge of Globalisation: Landscapes and Identities Chairs: Patrizia Faccioli (IT) and Giuseppe Losacco (IT) The flow of images in the urban space and in the mediasystem represents elements of the interaction between two dimensions: the global and the local. The purpose of the session is to identify how the two dimensions interact in the construction of cultural identity. Papers are solicited to examine how the flow of global culture and the counteractive aspects and specificities of local cultures conflict, contradict, or blend, both in personal and social dimensions. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Patrizia Faccioli, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Giuseppe Losacco, Institute of Sociology, University of Bologna, Italy. The School and the City Chair: Eric Margolis (US) Following Plutarch, who argued that the city not the school was the best teacher, this session welcomes papers that examine the city as an educational space. Schools, of course, operate within the urban space and play an important part in creating metropolitan people; learning visibly takes place both in cities and in city schools. Researchable questions include but are not limited to: What does urban education look like in and out of school? What are the visual educational lessons of urban life: creative and cultural, civic, political, and economic, sport and recreation? How does the city function as archive and as a repertoire of bodily performances? How does architecture, and urban artifice school the body? How does one learn and what does it look like to be city folk: cosmopolitan, metropolitan, urbane, or tough, slick, and dangerous? How have people schooled in the ways of the city been portrayed in the past and how are they seen today? Presentations ranging from standard paper (powerpoint) presentations to posters, videos, animations OR? For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Eric Margolis, Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Arizona State University. Contemporary Cities on the Margins of Modernity: Privatised Urbanism and Social Exclusion Chairs: Anne Pitcher and Martin Murray (US) This session addresses the relationship between evolving urban forms and social inequalities in contemporary cities in developing and transitional countries. In many cities on the margins of modernity, spatial restructuring of the urban landscape has resulted in new kinds of division, separation, and fragmentation. The global trend toward what has been called privatised urbanism has coincided with new modes of urban governance. Private solutions to public challenges and spatial partitioning of urban landscapes have produced the proliferation of such enclosed sites of luxury as citadel office complexes, upscale shopping malls, gated residential estates, and the growing consumption of late model SUVs and luxury cars. Paralleling this shift has been the steady expansion of such spaces of confinement for the urban poor as shantytowns, squatter camps, and informal settlements. As the anxious rich retreat behind walls, barriers, and fences, or within the relative comfort of their luxury cars, the urban poor are pushed out of the mainstream of urban life and compelled to fend for themselves in the dwindling, and under-resourced public places of the city. The session will examine the simultaneous and inter-dependent expression of conspicuous consumption and gentrification; social exclusion and displacement. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Anne Pitcher or Murray Martin, Colgate University, NY. Comparative Contexts in Visual Sociology Chair: Vivian Price (US) Sociologists often use comparisons across cultures, between geographical settings, political economies, and urban spaces, as part of an analysis of social processes. How do cities play an explicit or implicit role in representing the context of difference or similarity in comparative studies? When does the city stand for the nation, and when does it stand for something unique against the field of other urban settings? How does the city produce meaningful context in which to place social phenomena? For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Vivian Price, California State University, Dominguez Hills. Ethnicity, Transnational Space and Urban Life Chairs: Laksmi and Tulasi Srinivas (US) In an era of increasing global flows, cities face the challenge of growing cultural and ethnic restructuring with spatial, social and cultural consequences. Urban areas and urban social life are being reshaped as a result of transnationalism. This session is interested in examining the intersection of ethnicity, transnationalism, space and culture in urban localities and the relationship between transnational spaces and the cities they are embedded in. Papers are invited that examine visible evidence of the articulation and expression of ethnicity and cultural diversity in cities, the reproduction, reinvention and interrogation of ethnicity and culture in various urban contexts, and the relevance of transnational spaces to the city and to everyday life for its residents. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Laksmi Srinivas, Wellesley College or <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Tulasi Srinivas, Wheaton College. Crime, War, Disaster and Terror in Cities Chair: Mary Romero (US) Aurora Wallace (US) These past few years have been particularly hard on cities; from the terrorist attack on the New York and Washington, to the "Shock and Awe" attack on Bagdad; from the Tsunami that struck Banda Ache to Hurricane Katrina that struck New Orleans, man made and natural disasters have turned some of the most densely populated places on earth into piles of rubble. These horrific events have also been among the most widely photographed of our time and the photographs circulated throughout the world via the Internet. How have images been used to support or resist particular political agendas? How have they contributed meaning to these events? How have they led to action? This session on Crime, Disaster and Terror in Cities seeks to contribute sociological understanding these and other questions. Studies of photographs, video, editorial cartoons, graffiti, and other images are welcome. This session will also address the technologies of visualization. From the ubiquitous red-pinned map in police bureaus to more recent Google mash-ups combining online maps with crime or disaster data. This panel will investigate the space between virtual representations and real city places, including all manner of professional, amateur, ethnographic, fictional and mass-mediated representations, as tools used both to document and navigate the built environment of the city. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Mary Romero, School of Justice & Social Inquiry, Arizona State University. or <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Aurora Wallace, NYU, New York City Imaging the City after Humanism Chairs Stephen Read and Alexander Vollebregt (NL) This session deals with Urban Futures. While it is undeniable that human action shapes the city, it is by no means clear that the city is built in man's (or woman's) humanistically conceived measure or even that people recognize the object ostensibly our hand. Papers are invited which discuss images of the contemporary city from two perspectives: 1) that of the human social subject and her/his life world - how (s)he) engages the city in creative and potentially positive ways, and; 2) that of the socially engaged urban practitioner or theorist attempting to find ways to humanly and socially enabling post-humanist futures. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Stephen Read and Alexander Vollebregt, Spacelab Research Laboratory of the Contemporary City, Delft University of Technology, NL. NON TOPIC RELATED PROPOSALS Theoretical and Methodological Issues of Visual Research Chair: Luc Pauwels (BE) and Marco Rangone (IT) This session provides a forum for the in-depth discussion of a variety of critical aspects with respect to the theoretical and methodological underpinning of visual research in the social sciences. The focus of the presentations should lie on methodological, typological, theoretical, ethical, or technological aspects in a more generic sense. This does not rule out papers that also have an applied focus but it does mean that the presentation and discussion of visual methodology or theoretical issues, and their potential for applying them to different themes and fields should be highlighted. The aim of this session is to contribute to the construction of a more solid and explicit theoretical and methodological basis for the use of visuals in social scientific endeavours. These efforts may help to solidify visual research as a viable and credible alternative or complement to other types of social and cultural research. Topics may include: Refined typologies or taxonomies of visual research; Presentation/discussion of new modes of visual research; visual sampling and shooting strategies; discussion of best practices within a particular visual approach; theoretical, technological or ethical issues; dilemmas and opportunities in the collection/production; processing or presentation and use of visual data; the impact of new technologies on visual research; discussion of useful theories for addressing the visual aspects of society. Unlike other social sciences, economics has seldom made use of visual methods to further economic knowledge of reality. This is largely due to the epistemic nature of the dominant paradigm, which is primarily quantitative and deductive. Regional economics is one of the fields of inquiry open to visual methods. The session also invites regional economists to discuss how their work may include visual methods. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Luc Pauwels, Department of Communication, University of Antwerp or <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Marco Rangone, Department of Sociology, University of Padova. Visual Methods: New Approaches and Possibilities Chairs: Tracy X. Karner (US) or Giovanni Boccia-Artieri (IT) This session invites papers focused on the logistical aspects of conducting image-based research. Challenging case studies or creative approaches to addressing various aspects of doing visual work are especially welcome -- including innovative use of new technologies (podcasting, blogging, all sorts of communication on the Internet), new possibilities for the use of old technologies (photography, videography, archives, etc), as well as visual means to address standard ethnographic steps (gaining entrée, ensuring human subjects approval, data collection, analysis, and presentation). This paper session, therefore, will provide an intellectual space to discuss the following aspects related to the new opportunity: (1) Theoretical and conceptual considerations; (2) Methodological contributions; (3) Empirical studies. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Tracy X. Karner University of Houston, Texas. or <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Giovanni Boccia-Artieri Facoltà di Sociologia, Università di Urbino Papers not covered by any of the above sessions may be sent for consideration to Yuri Kazepov or Erica Barbiani at <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED] ROUND TABLES, POSTERS AND VIDEO Visual Pedagogies Chair: Jerry Krase (US) This session invites presenters who teach visual sociology or anthropology at the undergraduate and graduate levels or who take a visual approach to their field of specialization such as The Family, Criminology, Sociology of Community, etc. Presenters should provide syllabi and/or assignments and then critically reflect on student work; for example papers, exhibitions, web sites etc. It would be ideal if the students themselves could present their won work. We would then discuss what does and does not "work" in various settings. For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Jerome Krase, Sociology Department, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. The city exhibited: between theory, methodology and art Chair: Erica Barbiani (IT) In addition to paper presentations, there would be a specific space at the conference for a few photo exhibits, and a time slot for screening videos and documentaries. Besides keeping the city as a core theme, the submitted work should be based on theoretical and/or methodological considerations, which could be briefly discussed with the audience at a specific session, or after the screening. For submitting your works please send: An abstract of 500 words that sets your visual work in the context of sociological studies and that explains its qualities and relevance. A sample of your work: 5 .jpg pictures for a photo exhibit, a DVD (PAL) copy of your video or documentary. A list of the technical equipment necessary to show or screen your work: number and size of the prints, format and length of the video. Please send your submission to <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Erica Barbiani. [EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 212-2431970, 212-2433181(ext.31) ITU-Institute of Social Sciences Architecture Faculty - Taskisla 34437-Istanbul Brings words and photos together (easily) with <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/PMall/*http://photomail.mail.yahoo.com>PhotoMail - it's free and works with Yahoo! Mail. ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
