Friday, October 10, 2008

Performance and the Global City

ATHE Conference, New York, 2009 Call for Papers
“Performance and the Global City”

We invite proposals for papers investigating the intersections of urban issues and performances of all kinds in cities beyond the Anglophone West. “Performance and the Global City” at the ATHE 2009 Conference in New York City will comprise a series of paper panels hosted across several working groups; papers will not be clustered according to geographic region, but will rather be grouped around the urban policy and culture issues that each addresses. We are especially interested in the relationship among theatre events, both formal and informal, and any number of urban culture issues, including: urban policy (its making and its implementation); civic architecture (both utopic and resistive); discourses of municipal and state power; underground city-building movements; homelessness and other forms of dispossession; racial tensions; other embodied tensions. The panels will ask the broad but focusing questions:
  • How does performance intervene in the making of the contemporary non-Western city?
  • How is that city “global,” and in what ways do theatre and performance help to shape the understanding of that term, and mitigate its defining tensions, outside of the Anglophone West?

    Specific topics to be addressed may include (but not be limited to):

    • performance, the urban, and mobility studies
    • border studies
    • east asian urban development
    • utopian architectures in “third world” global cities
    • performance and the Mediterranean city, past and present
    • traditional performances in contemporary urban contexts
    • indigenous peoples and the urban (in both Western and non-Western city spaces)
    • architecture and design for refugee communities
    • the civic impact of civil and global war

    Please send 250-word abstracts, a 50-word bio, and your contact information to: dhopkins@mail.sdsu.edu; morr@mail.sdsu.edu; and ksolga@uwo.ca NO LATER THAN 24 OCTOBER 2008. Successful participants will be notified by 31 October 2008.

Convened by D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, Kim Solga

More info about ATHE
http://www.athe.org/about/faq