Workshop
2008 Conference, “Language and the Scientific Imagination”
International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) Helsinki University, Finland

Chairpersons:
Ben Dorfman, Dept. of Languages and Culture (Aalborg University, Denmark)
Bent Sørensen, Dept. of Languages and Culture (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Technology-facilitated mobility presents both contemporary cultural and social challenges as well as challenges in terms of historical understanding. As noted in a range of discourses, historical and contemporary processes of identity de- and reterritorialization have been both facilitated and engendered by the advance of travel technologies over the course of the twentieth century. Moreover, the historical imagination of particular modes of transport and mobility – from the automobile to the train to the recently grounded commercial supersonic jet – frame and support social imaginations of particular historical eras and events. Such imaginations can span, e.g., the allure of the road and travel to the Beat generation, the comradery of the underground and air raid shelters in London under the Blitz and the recent marketing of Smart cars for crowded European cities.

This workshop seeks to explore the historical imagination and representation of travel technologies in Europe and America in the twentieth century, as well as explore metaphors and understandings of technologically-facilitated human movement within the cultural spaces of modernity and postmodernity. In doing so, it seeks to comprehend the effects and speculate on the future of those metaphors and understandings as well as highlight them as productive sites for future historical, cultural and literary research.

Abstracts should be submitted to either Ben Dorfman, bdorfman@hum.aau.dk or Bent Sørensen, i12bent@hum.aau.dk

Deadline for submission is May 1, 2008

More information about the conference may be found at http://issei2008.haifa.ac.il/