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.”
For details, please refer to the conference website: https://urbannarrativesnetwork.com/urban-mediations-2024/
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 May 2024
Email: urbanmediations24@gmail.com
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)