Call for Lightning-Paper Presentation Session Participants:
Session Title: Urban Cultural Studies I & II
Where: American Association of Geographers meeting in April 2019, Washington, D.C.
Cities have been increasingly at the forefront of debate in both humanities and social science disciplines, but there has been relatively little real dialogue across these disciplinary boundaries. Journals in social science fields that use urban studies methods to look at life in cities rarely explore the cultural aspects of urban life in any depth or delve into close-readings of the representation of cities in individual novels, music albums/songs, graphic novels, films, videogames, online ‘virtual’ spaces, or other artistic and cultural products. On the other hand, while there is increasing discussion of urban topics and themes in the humanities, broadly considered, there are very few journal publications that are open to these new interdisciplinary directions of scholarship. This session is open to scholarship from any and all linguistic, cultural and geographical traditions. Presentations will cross the humanities and the social sciences while giving priority to the urban phenomenon, in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities.
This Urban Cultural Studies I session is affiliated with the double-blind peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=225/) and the accompanying blog urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com. Although the journal is open to many specific methodologies that blend humanities research with social-science perspectives on the city, its central methodological premise of the journal is perhaps best summed up by cultural studies-pioneer Raymond Williams – who emphasized giving equal weight to the ‘project (art)’ and the ‘formation (society)’. We are particularly interested in presentations that achieve some balance between discussing an individual (or multiple) cultural/artistic product(s) in depth and also using one of many social-science (geographical, anthropological, sociological…) urban approaches to investigate a given city. Lightning-paper participants will ideally address both an individual city itself and also its cultural representation in a very brief 5-minute talk. Following all of the 5-minute presentations, discussion will be opened to the audience.
If you are interested in sharing a current or future project in this Urban Cultural Studies session at the AAG 2019 in Washington D.C., please contact the Executive Editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Benjamin Fraser (Professor at the University of Arizona) at urbanculturalstudies@gmail.com. This session is open to scholarship from any and all linguistic, cultural and geographical traditions. Presentations will cross the humanities and the social sciences while giving priority to the urban phenomenon, in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. Lightning-paper participants will ideally address both an individual city itself and also its cultural representation in a very brief 5-minute talk.
urbanculturalstudies 