Call for Papers: Architecture & Collective Life. 16th AHRA Conference. Dundee, 21-23 November 2019
If you want to know what society looks like, look at our cities: look at their distribution of spaces and artefacts; look at their scales, intensities, and densities. Look at how they curate events. Architecture & Collective Life will explore the relations that bind people and environments into settlements, and settlements into civilisations. In The Politics Aristotle argued that the city has a particular form because public life has a particular form. Vitruvius’ account of the primitive hut is as much about the emergence of society as it is about the emergence of architecture. Today, new media and digital technologies are creating new forms of association, which are shifting the locus of political life; and it is now no longer possible for Hannah Arendt, reading Aristotle, to so neatly equate the city with politics. This discourse is urgent. The post-war public realm is under pressure from market-led ideologies and development practices. The damage we are doing to the environment, and the way identity politics has shifted the tenor of public debate, raise questions from seemingly opposite corners about our capacities to organise for thoughtful collective action.
Architecture & Collective Life is interested in how the individual and the collective are constructed and reproduced in public and private life, at different scales, in different disciplines, with the intention of keeping these categories as open as possible to different areas of thought and action. The conference would like to know how collectives are constructed around labour, power, authority, authorship, events, times, places, non-places, otherness, ecology, technology, media, the zeitgeist, ideologies, consciousness, origins, histories, beauty, housing, and campfires. The AHRA is particularly keen to explore the contributions of architecture to this process, including the roles of research, the humanities, and the University – the institution with a social mandate for intellectual culture and education – in building forms of collective intelligence and collective life.
Architecture & Collective Life will constitute an inclusive and critical discourse with a broad interdisciplinary base in the liberal arts and sciences, with a programme of debates and round table discussions and exhibitions, public lectures, film screenings, and paper sessions. The conference invites theorists, practitioners, and community activists within and outwith academe, in charities, public agencies and institutions, to present proposals for individual papers and paper sessions. The conference wants to be a forum for thinking out loud and in public, with the openness, commitment, and criticality that we expect to find in the University.
The AHRA is now accepting abstracts for its 16th annual conference in Dundee on 21-23 November 2019. AHRA encourages submissions from architects, urbanists, planners, community activists, and policymakers, alongside scholars and practitioners from related fields including: philosophy, history, law, politics, economics, psychology, geography, sociology, and medicine. We welcome independent scholars, interested individuals and students. Over the course of the three day conference there will be five keynote lectures, 30 paper sessions and a number of round table discussions. We are accepting abstracts for individual papers, paper sessions, and round table discussions. Please mark clearly the format of your proposal.
Please submit proposals no later than 5pm on 1 February 2019.
More information about the conference and the call for papers can be found here.