Historians in Space: Concepts of Space in recent European Historiography

Call for papers

“HISTORIANS IN SPACE”

Concepts of Space in recent European Historiography 

7th Annual Graduate Conference in European History

April 25-27, 2012

Budapest, Central European University

Organized by the Central European University, Budapest in co-operation with the European University Institute, Florence and the University of Vienna.

Historicize space! This injunction has not always been on the agenda of historians. Traditionally, historians were tempted to take space for granted. The boundaries of the nineteenth century nation-state were regarded as the natural presupposition of much historical research. These established “mental maps” still continue to influence the structure of history writing today. However, historians were not entirely immune to the effects of the “spatial turn” and can probably no longer be accused to treat space as if it were “packed solidly on to the head of a pin,” as Edward W. Soja did in his Postmodern Geographies in 1989.

History is primarily about time, about what happened when. Concurrently, it should not be forgotten that events and processes took place somewhere. Historical phenomena have a setting, a location - their place. However, taking their cue from geography, anthropology and sociology, some historians have come to broaden established notions of space. The concept may not refer merely to “geographical” or “real space” which “contains” peoples, nations and cultures. Rather, it may as well point to socially and culturally constructed objects of inquiry and how these are perceived by individuals or groups. In other words, space is understood as being framed through social and cultural relations, as Henri Lefebvre showed already in his path-breaking The Production of Space (1974).

Thus, some historical phenomena are essentially marked by their spatial dimensions and can thus be better approached from the vantage point of spatiality alongside temporality. The 7th Graduate Conference in European History (GRACEH) is inviting graduate students and young researchers to reflect on the rather ambiguous relationship historians entertain with the category of “space.”

We are welcoming abstracts which interrogate the various understandings of space, those which present new methodological approaches to the topic, and case studies which are placed within a wider theoretical context. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:

1. Historians and Space: methodological and theoretical approaches
2. Representations of space
3. Going Global: linking local, regional, national, transnational history
4. Symbolic geography and cultural spaces: for example ‘Europe’, ‘Central Europe’, ‘Southeast Europe’ or the ‘Balkans’, the ‘Levant’, the ‘Orient’, etc.
5. The spatial constitution of politics: empires and nation states (territoriality, kinship)
6. Economic history: world systems, ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, ‘backwardness’
7. Spatial dimensions of everyday life: approaching gender, ethnicity, class, religion
8. Urban spaces (morphology, planning; spaces of production, consumption and exchange, urban/rural divides)
9. Geographies of knowledge: production and transfers
10. Space and Memory
11. Digital technologies and tools for writing spatial history, visualizations, Geographical Information Systems

The working language of the conference will be English. Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words and a brief CV to graceh[at]ceu.hu by January 20, 2013. Full papers will be pre-circulated and grouped into thematic panels of 3 to 4 contributions. We would like to ask all participants to prepare a presentation of no more than 15 minutes, in order to allow ample time for discussion and questions.

Final papers are due on March 31, 2013.

GRACEH 2013 Organizers:

Jan Bröker, Mihai-Dan Cirjan, Adrian Grama, Liliana Iuga, Oskar Mulej, Zsuzsa Sidó

GRACEH 2013 Advisory Board:

Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Head of the CEU Department of History and of the School of Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies, EC member of the Religious Studies Program

László Kontler, Professor at the CEU Department of History, Pro-Rector for Hungarian and EU Affairs

http://graceh2013.wordpress.com/

Eredeti felhívás itt.

RGS-IBG Conference (2013): The Making of the English Working Class at Fifty

The Making of the English Working Class at Fifty: Space, Agency and History From Below

Convenors: David Featherstone, Neil Gray and Paul Griffin, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow.

Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group and the Political Geography Research Group.

For the RGS-IBG Conference 2013.

50 years on from its original publication E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class continues to inspire and to provoke critical debate and reflection. A foundational text of what has come to be known as ‘history from below’, the book has impacted on contexts far beyond the West-Riding of Yorkshire or the back rooms of London pubs that were the key sites of the book. It has been a pivotal text, even if primarily through critical dialogue, within intellectual traditions as diverse as History Workshop in South Africa and Subaltern Studies.

The Making has, of course, been subject to numerous critiques and engagements notably by feminist and post-colonial critics (Clark, 1995, Hall, 1992). The cultural nationalism that informed Thompson’s work have been robustly contested by Paul Gilroy (1987, 1993). Forms of Thompsonian inspired social history have been productively taken in more transnational dimensions by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. In geography its reception was subject to significant debate, especially in relation to Derek Gregory’s critique of Thompson’s account of the relations between class and space. Engagement with Thompson’s work, however, has been oddly absent from recent debates on workers’ agency in labour geography. His commitment to asserting and recovering diverse forms of agency in shaping class formation, however, resonates with many critical geographical projects.

This session seeks to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Making. It seeks to use this as an opportunity for critical reflections on Thompson’s text and to consider the relations between geographical work and ‘history from below’. The session invites both critical commentaries and empirically informed papers. These might consider:

•  The imaginations of space and place in the Making of English Working Class

•  The transnational impact of the Making of the English Working Class

•  The contested geographies of the new left

•  Critical engagements with Thompson’s use of the terms experience and agency.

•  The political contexts that shaped The Making of the English Working Class

•  The relations between Thompson, Subaltern Histories and attempts to think history from below spatially.

Abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent to Dave Featherstone (David.Featherstone[at]glasgow[dot]ac[dot]uk) by February 8th.