Understanding Material Loss Across Time and Space Conference
17-18 February 2017, University of Birmingham
https://understandingmaterialloss2017.wordpress.com/
Understanding Material Loss intends to examine the usefulness of ‘loss’ as an analytical framework across different disciplines and subfields, but principally within historical studies. Loss and absence are slowly being recognized as significant factors in historical processes, particularly in relation to the material world. Archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars, sociologists and historians have increasingly come to understand the material world as an active and shaping force. Nevertheless, while significant, such studies have consistently privileged material presence as the basis for understanding how and why the material world has played an increasingly important role in the lives of humans. In contrast, Understanding Material Loss suggests that instances of absence, as much as presence, provide important means of understanding how and why the material world has shaped human life and historical processes.
Speculative and exploratory in nature, Understanding Material Loss asserts that in a period marked by ecological destruction, but also economic austerity, large scale migration and increasing resource scarcity, it is important that historians work to better understand the ways in which humans have responded to material loss in the past and how such responses have shaped change. Understanding Material Loss asks: how have humans historically responded to material loss and how has this shaped historical processes? The conference will bring together a range of scholars in an effort more to begin to explore and frame a problem, than provide definitive answers.
Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• Professor Pamela Smith, History, Columbia
• Simon Werrett, Science and Technology Studies, UCL
• Professor Maya Jasanoff, History, Harvard
• Professor Jonathan Lamb, English, Vanderbilt
• Professor Anthony Bale, English and Humanities, Birkbeck
• Astrid Swenson, Politics and History, Brunel

Understanding Material Loss seeks to uncover the multiple practices and institutions that emerged in response to different forms of material loss in the past and asks, how has loss shaped (and been shaped by) processes of acquisition, possession, stability, abundance and permanence? By doing so it seeks to gauge the extent to which ‘loss’ can be used as an organizing framework of study across different disciplines and subfields. Understanding Material Loss seeks papers from across a variety of time periods and geographies. Although open and speculative in nature, this conference will focus on three broad topics within the wider rubric of loss, in order to facilitate meaningful conversations and exchanges.
Using Materials

• How has the ‘loss’ of particular materials affected scientific practice, manufacturing, architectural design or development in the past?
• How have humans responded to the partial loss or decay of materials?
• How have ‘lost’ skills or knowledge affected the use of materials?
• How have humans re-appropriated or recycled seemingly damaged or obsolete materials?

Possessing Objects

• How have humans sought to maintain and mark the ownership of objects?
• How has the loss of possessions and property affected human mobility and constructions of identity?
• How have communities historically responded to the loss of particular objects? When and why have they sought to stave off the loss of things?
• Where, when and how have cultures of repair flourished?
• How has the loss of possessions and property (or the potential for loss) affected processes of production, consumption or financial stability?

Inhabiting Sites and Spaces

• When and why have particular sites or buildings been understood as destroyed or obsolete?
• How have past societies responded to the loss of particular sites?
• When and how have landscapes been actively purged of symbols and sites?
• How have past societies worked to rebuild or reclaim particular sites?
• What strategies did past societies develop to ensure the resilience of certain structures?

Please send proposals (250 words max per paper) for papers and panels to conference organizer Kate Smith ([email protected]) by Friday 14 October 2016. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Roundtable panels featuring 5-6 papers of 10 minutes each or other innovative formats are encouraged.
Thanks to Past & Present and the University of Birmingham for their generous support for the conference

UTOPIA AT THE BORDER
The fourth symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future Research Network University of Regensburg, 20-22nd September 2016
 
‘There was a wall. It did not look important…’ – Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
 
‘[We seek]…a world without borders, where no one is prevented from moving because of where you were born, or because of race, class or economic resources…’ – No Borders UK
 
‘We resolve…to strengthen control over our territories and to not permit the entry of any government functionary nor of a single transnational corporation.’ – The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador
 
Borders are a key feature of our present. Whether national, regional, physical, electronic, cognitive, performative or cultural, they unevenly regulate the movement of bodies, ideas, objects, capital and bytes. Geopolitical borders are frequently sites of domination, but they may also provide solace for oppressed groups, some of whom actively call for or construct borders so they might protect their ways of living and advance their struggles. Conceptual borders allow us to grasp a complex world, but may inhibit understanding, communication and change. Temporal borders, meanwhile, seek to fix history into discrete categories of past, present and future.
 
Yet borders are not permanent. They remain a key site of contestation and struggle; and must continually be remade through technology, performance and often violence. And border crossings transform subjects, the space-times they leave, and the space-times they enter; as well as borders themselves. This means that utopianism – praxis that seeks to transform space and time – has much to offer contemporary ways of relating to borders. It can educate our desire for alternatives, and by showing us these alternatives – in fiction, theory or practice – estrange us from borders as they currently exist. The need for utopian rethinking and contestation of borders strikes us as particularly urgent given the current refugee crisis in Europe, and the continued role of borders in neocolonial dispossession around the world. Yet whilst a utopian lens may have much to offer the thinking and practice of borders this does not mean that the utopian is without borders of its own. Indeed, despite a turn to ‘the horizon’ and process in recent utopian theory, borders play a key role in many fictional utopias and dystopias; in ‘real world’ utopian communities; and in definitions of utopia itself.
 
Utopia at the Border aims to consider the relationship between borders and the utopian. Borders are to be critically examined even as participants question their own relationships to borders through their work and travel. We would also like to think through what is gained and lost by extending the notion of borders beyond the geopolitical. We welcome papers of up to 20 minutes and are open to artistic or activist contributions; as well as to interventions that fall between or go beyond such boundaries. Please contact us if you would like to discuss this informally before submitting a proposal, or if you would like to take up more than 20 minutes.  A special issue of the Open Library of the Humanities journal will be produced drawing on presentations from the symposium. This will form part of the Imaginaries of the Future publication series.
 
Papers may engage with one or more of the following aspects of borders, although this is by no means an exhaustive list:
 
THE BORDERS OF UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA
-Borders in utopian and dystopian texts
-The borders of utopian communities
-Anti-borders utopianism in theory, fiction and practice
 
COLONIALISM, DECOLONIZATION, INDIGENEITY AND BORDERS -Colonial border construction and praxis -Reservations -Indigenous borders -New and future borders: Antarctica, under the sea, extraterrestrial?
 
(ANTI-)BORDER TECHNOLOGIES AND PRACTICES -Passports -Walls, fences, barricades -Raids, detention and deportation -Metrics and biometrics -Anti-borders activism
 
(REFUSING) TEMPORAL BORDERS
-The division of time into past, present and future -Spatial borders as temporal borders -Spatial history -The ‘not-yet’, the immanent, the prefigurative
 
BORDERS, IDENTITY AND THE BODY
-Borders, race and racialization
-Non-conforming bodies at the border
-Affect at the border
-Mestiza and cross-border identities
 
PUBLIC SPACE, THE COMMONS AND ENCLOSURE
-Borders and the commons
-Gated communities
-Border technologies in urban space
-Vertical borders
-Barricades
 
CROSS BORDER (NON-)COMMUNICATION
-Online borders
-Disciplinary and conceptual borders
-Censorship and gate-keeping
-Communication technologies and border activism
 
MORE-THAN-HUMAN/NON-HUMAN BORDERS
-Non-humans at the border
-Finance, goods and trade
-Wilderness, nature and ecology
-Chemical, biological and physical borders/boundaries
 
ART OF THE BORDER; ART AT THE BORDER; ART AGAINST THE BORDER -The architecture and aesthetics of (former) border crossings -Artistic performance and representation of/at borders, their crossings and their refusals -Passport design
 
BEYOND BORDERS
-Non-state space; the state of exception -Necropolitics and the border -Exile and statelessness -International waters
 
STRUGGLES WITH AND AGAINST BORDERS
-Fortress Europe and the migrant crisis
-Border struggles and crossings in history, religion and myth -Smuggling
 
BORDERS AND LABOUR
-Freedom of movement and ‘the career’
-Borders and divisions of labour
-University staff as border agents
 
COST
There is no fee to attend the symposium. Lunches and refreshments will be provided during the days of the symposium.
 
BURSARIES
Five bursaries – two of up to £1,000, and three of up to £350 – will be awarded through open competition to individuals who wish to contribute to the symposium. These can be used to cover food, travel and accommodation costs, but can only be reclaimed after the symposium upon production of receipts. The larger bursaries are intended for applicants traveling a significant distance to attend the symposium. We welcome submissions from all academic career stages, as well as from non academics. Bursary recipients will be expected to contribute a piece of writing and/or media for the Network blog. If you would like to apply for a bursary please clearly state this with your proposal, and state whether you are applying for up to £350 or up to £1,000. Please also attach a CV (if a CV is not appropriate to convey the experiences you would draw on in presenting, please email [email protected] before applying).
 
PROPOSALS
Please send proposals (up to 300 words) to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]. Please indicate in your email if you would be interested in contributing to the special journal issue, which would have a deadline in spring 2017. The deadline for proposals is midnight (BST) on Sunday June 12th.
 
If you have any questions about this call please email [email protected].

This comes via the Legal Temporalities Network

Sensing Time: the Art & Science of Clocks & Watches
Friday 17th June -  Saturday 18th June 2016.
 
Friday 17th June evening lecture at the Science Museum:
Time for Shakespeare by Professor Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford
Free, booking required

Saturday 18th June study day, V&A:
Sensing Time: the Art & Science of Clocks & Watches
An interdisciplinary study day which will bring together international expertise from museum curators, historians, clock-makers and conservators.
£50, £40 concessions, £15 student, booking required

 Saturday 18th June evening concert by Florilegium, Foundling Museum:
£18, booking required