Abstracts deadline: 01 June 2001
The conference will take place in LSB College, Dublin
(an affiliate of Dublin Business School)
Balfe Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
24-27 August 2001
Confirmed Keynote Speakers include Edward W. Soja, Gayatri Spivak, Immanuel Wallerstein, Anthony Cronin and Declan Kiberd
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. It is intended that the proceedings of this conference will be submitted to a publisher as an edited volume.
Abstracts are requested for the following panels:
Social Theory and the City from Marx and the Frankfurt School to Post-structuralism
Reading and Writing Urban Lives: the city in literature and journalism
The City in the era of Globalisation: theories, methods and practices
The Global City in Historical Context
Please send all abstracts to Mark Maguire (Department of Anthropology) or Paul Hollywood (Department of English Literature and Drama), LSB College, Balfe Street, Dublin 2, Republic of Ireland,
Phone: +353 – 1 – 6485485 or Email: MMaguire@Ireland.com
to arrive before 01 June 2001
