Though the city has long been associated with speed and spectacle, including its fast-flowing transport systems and towering buildings, it has also always harboured more mundane activity and sights such as the rehearsed small talk of (consequential) strangers and the habitual queues of daily commuters. These everyday practices (in Michel de Certeau\u2019s terms) form ordinary spaces that are fundamental to the urban imaginary yet are rarely explored in artistic endeavours and, connectedly, rarely granted a cultural value that adequately conveys the social value they afford a city\u2019s population. <\/p>\n
In broader discourse on cities, when the notion of \u2018ordinariness\u2019 is accepted as an urban quality it often fuels a centre\/periphery binary, with artistic and scholarly interest only occurring when it is located in the latter (the sustained representation of suburban ennui, for example). Resonating with Njabulo S. Ndebele\u2019s work (1991), it is important that cities \u2013 where the spectacle of state trauma and violence is often most obvious \u2013 are understood in more complex terms, with everyday urban lives foregrounded. Additionally, there is a tendency within and beyond academia to hierarchise cities, with those in the Global North held up as the model to which all others are compared, despite Jennifer Robinson\u2019s (2006) seminal work in calling for an alternative framework where all cities are considered \u2018ordinary\u2019 and worthy of examination. <\/p>\n
In linking together different strands of understanding ordinariness then, this conference seeks to (re)establish the value of the \u2018ordinary city\u2019 as it is employed, constructed and imagined in a range of artworks including, but not limited to: literature, visual art, screen media, theatre and performance. <\/p>\n
The conference will take place over two days and will explore 3 themes:<\/p>\n
Theme 1: Overlooked Cities It is intended that selected papers will become part of an edited collection.<\/p>\n We welcome abstracts (max. 300 words) in one of the three main conference themes. Please indicate in the abstract which of the listed sub-themes you would like to contribute to. Submissions should include the title of the paper, author\u2019s full name, email address and affiliation (e.g. university, college, archive, independent researcher\/artist) plus a short biography (50 words). Final conference presentations should be 20 minutes.<\/p>\n The conference will take place in-person, but we may consider online zoom attendance by request. If applicable, please indicate this request in your submission. <\/p>\n The abstracts should be sent as a Word doc or pdf file via e-mail to imaginingordinarycity@gmail.com, with the subject: \u2018Imagining the Ordinary City Conference Abstract\u2019. The deadline for abstract submissions is 30 May<\/strong> and all applicants will be notified of the outcome by mid June. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Though the city has long been associated with speed and spectacle, including its fast-flowing transport systems and towering buildings, it has also always harboured more mundane activity and sights such as the rehearsed small talk of (consequential) strangers and the habitual queues of daily commuters. These everyday practices (in Michel de Certeau\u2019s terms) form ordinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1525,"featured_media":76,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":379,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions\/379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/imagining-ordinary-cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTheme 2: Mundanity in the Metropolis
\nTheme 3: \u2018Ordinariness\u2019 as multi-faceted artistic lens <\/strong><\/p>\n