IMAGINING SPACES / PLACES

An international interdisciplinary conference

24−26 August 2011, University of Helsinki, Finland

—————————

Conference venue

University of Helsinki, Main building
Address: Fabianinkatu 33 – see map.
(The main building is marked with a red circle at the centre of the map.)
The opening and plenaries are held in the Small Hall (4th floor).
The sessions take place on the 3rd floor.

See the main programme and session programme.

Note to the speakers
The session programme will be finalized at the beginning of August once the registration period has ended. All sessions consist of three 20 minute presentations followed by 10 minutes for  discussion  after each paper. All lecture halls have a computer with Internet access and PowerPoint.

—————————

Literature and art mediate our experiences of the spaces and places surrounding us as well as within us. In contemporary discussion we use, besides the old term ‘landscape’, other ‘scapes’ which reflect a new interest and new thinking with regard to spaces: we speak of cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and even memoryscapes, and their relationships to one another. The intertwining of what, of old, was called ‘macrocosm’ (nature and society) and ‘microcosm’ (body and mind) and the role various art forms and media play in articulating and negotiating these chiasmic encounters is the focal point of the Imagining spaces/places conference. How are the interfaces between ‘the place in you and you in the place’ depicted? How are these imagined and material landscapes gendered and sexualized?

The conference seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history, literature and gender studies. We welcome papers addressing issues of representing and creating spaces in literature, art or film, and emphasizing the gendered, emotional and political or ideological character of these cultural mediations and re-mediations.

The conference is organized by the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Art History, the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies and the Finnish Research School in Women’s and Gender Studies.