CITY & (DIS)ORDER
(Re)Mapping the Metropolis ; (De)Coding Urban (dis)order in the Discourses of Culture
The renewed interest in exploring the urban theme in the arenas of culture studies and the constructs of literary and artistic creativity has quite often coincided with the moments of crises, of major changes in the conceptualizing of historical processes and of the human experience and consciousness of environmental questions, of belonging and alienation.
Whether in the urban studies or in the literary imagination, the scope of the relation between the mapping of the metropolis, or the urban experience, on the one hand, and the human perception of (dis)order, on the other, has been explored from a variety of angles. From George Simmel’s (1903) influential argument about the meaningful connection between the advent of the modern city and the “sense of calculating exactness” that resulted from the development of money economy (MML 327-28) , to the literary conceptions of the modern metropolis as a puzzling incarnation of a sense of impersonal order but also of a pending chaos, the representations of the city in the discourses of culture has been closely connected to the (re)thinking, the (re)conceptualizing of the human condition and action, and of the very concept of culture.
The conference invites contributions that examine some of the theoretical, historical, and critical axes relevant to the urban thematics and the concept of (dis)order, in addition to the implications that the (re)mapping of the metropolis generates with regard to our conceptualization of culture and environment.
Some of the thematic axes that may be explored:
- Major turning points in the historical and sociological axes of urban studies
-The metropolis in the ecocritical approaches to Culture
-City images and city narratives and the sense of a (im)possible totality
-Urban symbol/motif and the ethics/politics of artistic representation
-The metropolitan topography and the patterns of class-based/gender-based/race-based order
-Modern metropolis vs Postmetropolis in the contemporary literary imagination
-Politics of order and contemporary urban theory
Abstracts (250 to 300 words) are to be sent to the conference address:
Venue: Ecole Normale Supérieure
Date: 11th and 12th April 2018
Deadline for abstract submissions: 30 December 2017
Notification of acceptance: by 30th January 2018
A selection of papers presented in the conference will be published after a blind peer-review
Scientific Committee
Pr. Saloua Karoui- Elounelli
Pr. Hinda Guirat Ammar
Pr. Taoufik Djebali
Dr. Noureddine Fekir
Dr. Sadok Dammak