View the H-Levant Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Levant's October 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread]
View the Next Message in H-Levant's October 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread]
Visit the H-Levant home page.
Subject: Call for Papers: Visible and Invisible Urban Boundaries Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Date: October 3, 2013 Call for Papers International workshop Visible and Invisible Urban boundaries in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world from a comparative perspective Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, 22-23 May 2014 Conveners: Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi and Florian Riedler With this workshop we would like to take a fresh look on the cities and towns of the Ottoman world in order to try and gain a better understanding of their social condition, their cultural and political life, as well as their own representation and image of themselves by focussing on their internal boundaries. Very basically we are interested in questioning what sort of boundaries characterised different cities of the Ottoman world, be they functionally defined as borders between different parts of the city or between the city and its margins. Boundaries are understood here as both social and morphological between different communities, classes or groups of inhabitants and as signs, which are visible in the urban semiotic or even more implicit and pertaining in the symbolic dimension of urban life. We hope to examine how these boundaries intersected or ran parallel to one another and how they were expressed in urban space. This also implies the question of the role of the state, the Ottoman central government, local city regimes as well as the successor states in their various attempts at policing, altering, maintaining or abolishing urban boundaries according to their own understanding of order in the city. In addition, the perspective of the respective inhabitants, their way of crossing boundaries, neglecting, stressing or even challenging them, could be central to our understanding of city life. It is our aim to put urban boundaries into a historical perspective by asking about the processes of when and how they came into being and how they changed over time. This question is especially pertinent for the time of Ottoman modernisation in the nineteenth century and the transition from empire to nation state that followed different timelines in the regions under consideration. How did political borders that increasingly cut up imperial space impact internal urban boundaries? What happened to established urban boundaries during these transformations? Were they themselves transformed to continue to exist in a different form or to re-emerge later as phantoms? We like to attract new source based approaches to cities and towns in the wider Ottoman world that deal with these or related questions. Papers that allow comparisons with similar issues in other parts of the world are also highly welcome. Please send a 600 words abstract and a CV to Florian Riedler Florian.Riedler@zmo.de and Nora Lafi Nora.Lafi@zmo.de Deadline for abstract submission: November 30, 2013 Paper presenters will be informed about the selection by December 15, 2013 Some funds for travel and accommodation costs is available for participants. As this workshop is conceived as a fundamental step in the preparation of a collective book, presenters are also expected to provide a 7000/10000 words original version of their article by March 31, 2014 -- Privat Dozentin Dr. habil. Nora LAFI Researcher (BMBF) Zentrum Moderner Orient Kirchweg 33 D- 14129 Berlin http://www.zmo.de/Mitarbeiter/Lafi/index.htm http://zmo.academia.edu/NoraLafi --