Oslo International Graduate Students Conference: Space, Culture, and Religion: Considering Implications of the "Spatial Turn"
May 19, 2014–May 21, 2014, University of Oslo
Call for papers
recent years, the humanities and social sciences have seen a renewed
interest in spatiality. Scholars have increasingly considered ways in
which texts, history and cultural practices are physically embodied –
and, hence, spatially embedded. Notions of ‘space’, ‘place’ and
‘landscape’ are no longer the exclusive domain of geographers, but have
been appropriated by social anthropologists, scholars of religion,
historians and literary scholars. Following a number of other ‘turns’ in
the humanities, this development has been called ‘the spatial turn’
(e.g., Warf & Arias 2009). Scholars are studying aspects of space
from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, drawing on theories not
only from geography but also from philosophy and sociology. Thinkers
whose work has been rediscovered, or reinterpreted from a spatial
perspective, include Mikhail Bakhtin (‘chronotope’), Pierre Bourdieu
(‘social space’), Michel de Certeau (‘spatial stories’), Michel Foucault
(‘heterotopia’) and Henri Lefebvre (‘the production of space’). In this
conference, we would like to examine implications of the ‘spatial turn’
for the humanities. In particular, we look at the possible impact of
new considerations of space on the disciplines represented at our
institute: Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, cultural studies, and
the study of religion(s). We welcome papers on a variety of topics, as
long as they relate to our central topic. We particularly would like to
invite (post)graduate students and young (postdoc) researchers to
present papers on the spatial aspects of their own research.
conference will be divided into the following four subtopics: politics
of space; imaginations of space; history of space; writing space,
crafting space. Participants are requested to relate their presentation
to one of these four topics. For more information on these subtopics,
please see the conference website: http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/network/ikos-austin-collaboration/Graduate-Conference/. Those who wish to participate in the conference and present a paper are requested to submit an abstract (max. 500 words) before December 20, 2013.
Please indicate which of the four subthemes your paper relates to. Abstracts can be sent to Aike Rots at firstname.lastname@example.org.