The conference will take place in
Dublin Business School incorporating
LSB College, Balfe Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
24-27 August 2001

Ireland has long had a problematic relationship with the urban life. The city, passed over routinely by anthropologists, painters and poets in their search for the ‘real Ireland’, has often been seen as an alien intrusion, the outcrop of a foreign culture. It has, however, also been the inspiration for some of the last century’s most important artistic achievements: the source of another, alternative construction of identity. Globalisation and the recent in-migration of many people of diverse cultural backgrounds bring the story of urban Ireland to a new chapter, which requires a methodological and theoretical response. The city is at once a strange, unattended presence in our lives and, to borrow from Roland Barthes, “a discourse” that speaks to us and through which we speak ourselves.

With a special, though not exclusive, emphasis on Ireland, this is a multi-disciplinary conference that seeks to bring together contributors from a variety of backgrounds to consider questions central to contemporary experience of the urban: how is the increasingly global city known? In what ways does this manifest itself in cultural artefacts? How can the human sciences respond to and ‘write’ the metropolis?

This conference is organised into a series of panels intended to draw together several dovetailing approaches. Abstracts should fit precisely into one of the panels outlined below. It is intended that the proceedings of this conference will be submitted to a publisher as an edited volume.

• Panel 1: Social Theory and the City from Marx and the Frankfurt School to Post-structuralism
• Panel 2: Reading and Writing Urban Lives: the city in literature and journalism
• Panel 3: Whose City? A critical sociology of the city
• Panel 4: The City in the era of Globalisation: theories, methods and practices
• Panel 5: The Anthropology of Urban life: shifting contexts

There has been the addition of one extra, confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Gaytari Spivak from Columbia University.

Those speakers previously confirmed include, Edward W. Soja, Immanuel Wallerstein and Declan Kiberd

Please send all abstracts and suggestions for other panels to Mark Maguire or Paul Hollywood, LSB College, Balfe Street, Dublin 2, Republic of Ireland, Phone: +353 – 1 – 6485485 or Email: MMaguire@Ireland.com to arrive before 01 May 2001