Appel à communications : “Architecture & the Modern Subject” (Los Angeles, 21-22 avril 2017)

Appel à communications : “Architecture & the Modern Subject”

Deadline : Dec 15, 2016

(Los Angeles, 21-22 avril 2017)

Accédez à l’appel : cliquez ici

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words, along with a brief bio and cv to: thebodyspolitic@gmail.com. Limited funding for graduate student travel stipends are available; for consideration, please include a brief note detailing the circumstances of your request. Accepted submissions to be notified by the end of January 2017.

University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Architecture and Urban Design

The Body’s Politic: Architecture and the Modern Subject, Organized by students of the doctoral program in Critical Studies, April 2017

Abstract : Architecture has long been viewed as a civilizing mechanism: museums make publics, boulevards make populations, housing makes citizens. Under modernity, architecture has assumed an important place in the pantheon of power’s tools, explicitly deployed to create subjects. But this historical perspective quarantines political readings of architecture to the conservative, stationary, or merely incidental. How has the apparatus of architectural form, space, and representation worked in ways unseen by its contingent actors, and how has this apparatus biased contemporary scholarship? Imagining architecture as a Foucauldian dispositif, inscribing itself upon bodies and peripheral to larger spheres of social and political practice, how might focused studies of architecture’s professional, cultural and tectonic configurations provide new ways of considering the modern subject today? Looking through identity formation to the effects of political, legal, and techno-scientific systems, how have architectural objects not only constructed singular subjects but proven intrinsic to variegated subjectivities and contemporary politics of the body? How have the kinds and natures of these subjects varied through time, from the individual to the collective, the human to the nonhuman, the embodied to the metaphysical? And, unlike the reformers and statists of past historical tellings, how could architecture itself be considered a primary historical agent in these machinations?

We invite abstracts presenting research that historically locates the politics of subject-making as well as those that propose new methods for its transhistorical reading and analysis. Submissions are encouraged from PhD students, researchers, and graduate students in all fields, especially from architecture, art history, visual studies, the history of science and technology, the history of planning and public policy, political economy, cultural theory, gender and queer studies, anthropology, legal studies, and the history of business. Paper sessions will be guided and moderated by established international scholars.

Pascal Fort

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