URBAN KNOW-HOW: PRACTICE, POLITICS, AND PERFORMANCE

URBAN KNOW-HOW: PRACTICE, POLITICS, AND PERFORMANCE

Annual Conference of the AAG, Boston, Massachusetts, April 15-19, 2008

Organisers:
Shiloh Krupar (University of California, Berkeley)
David Pinder (Queen Mary, University of London)


Cities stimulate and provide the grounds for a profusion of creative practices that seek to engage
urban spaces critically. From the works of avant-garde artists to the interventions of scholars and
cultural workers, the range and inventiveness of attempts to know cities within and beyond the
academy, in both past and present, is striking. The session explores some of the strategies and
tools, used by cultural practitioners, artists, academics and people during the course of everyday
life, to document, represent, write, perform, and protest aspects of cities.

The session seeks to address the politics as well as the poetics of these strategies, and is
particularly interested in the emergence of new pedagogies that cultivate the potentialities of
cities and that are radically open, contingent and complex. Papers are invited that might involve
discussions of - or embody in themselves - writing strategies or uses of film, theatre,
performance, photography, guided tours and the like that foreground urban life and the politics of
cultural practice. This may include studies of creative practices from different places and periods,
as well as attempts to employ experimental methods for critical ends. As the session title
suggests, papers might also work to bring avant-garde experimentation and "practical/applied"
knowledge into tension with one another.

Please send proposals of up to 250 words to BOTH:

Shiloh Krupar (shiloh@berkeley.edu)
and David Pinder (D.Pinder@qmul.ac.uk)

by Monday 15th October.

Thanks.