Workshops – Urban Mediations: International Conference on the Narratives, Ecologies, and Poetics of the City

Urban Mediations: International Conference on the Narratives, Ecologies, and Poetics of the City (Hong Kong, 5-6 December 2024)

City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, 5 December 2024
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, 6 December 2024

Workshops

There will be two workshops running on the second day of the conference. Early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply.

Workshop One
(in association with Association for Literary Urban Studies)
Literary and Cultural Approaches to Place-based City Knowledge
Workshop Leader: Dr. Lieven Ameel

This workshop explores interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and the urban. To work within literary urban studies is on the crossroads of different disciplines and to engage in methods and resources from a range of fields, including cultural geography, urban history, planning theory, and architecture. Such interdisciplinary work also reinvigorates the field of literary studies itself, by drawing attention to narrative forms, spatial relationships, as well as modes of production and reading that tend to be neglected in established national literary histories or canons.

Interdisciplinary literary urban studies also generates important and innovative knowledge that can be of use in the fields of policymaking, urban planning, and regional management. Place-based urban knowledge tends to be presented in the form of quantifiable data, and the increase of digitalized practices and geographic information systems has only exacerbated the emphasis on quantitative data points. A literary and cultural approach shifts the focus toward knowledge that is qualitative rather than quantitative, relational and dynamic rather than static in meaning. Central for a qualitative and humanities-informed approach to place-based knowledge is a view in which personal and communal experiences take shape not as easily quantifiable data points, but rather within a storified interaction of personal and communal trajectories, recognizable plotlines, and relationships between different locations (including imaginary, past or future locations).

This workshop invites brief presentations (of 8-10 minutes). All topics relevant to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and the urban are possible, including (but not limited to) talks on representations of specific cities in literature, examples of interdisciplinary teaching or research in literary urban studies, or literary approaches to urban policy and planning. Presenters will receive feedback on their presentations and the workshop will end with a discussion and Q&A.

Lieven Ameel is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. He has widely published on experiences of space, narrative planning, and urban futures. His books include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014), The Narrative Turn in Planning (2020), and several co-edited volumes, most recently The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (2019), and Literatures of Urban Possibility (2021). He is the editor of the Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies (2022). He is one of the co-founders of the Association for Literary Urban Studies and one of the editors of the Palgrave series in literary urban studies.

Workshop Two
Mapping otherwise – spatial explorations between the digital and the ethnographic
Workshop Leader: Prof. Nishat Awan

In recent years, mapping and modelling have become key tools through which we understand spatial situations and are often also central to forms of intervention. While the practice of mapping has been thoroughly deconstructed, as can be discerned in the use of terms such as counter/radical cartography, counter mapping etc., within the realm of the digital many familiar problems have returned in a different guise, such as externalised reference points, immutable base maps, or simply our own unacknowledged presence. With interest in different forms of visual mapping and web-based archival projects flourishing across the humanities, this workshop explores methods of “mapping otherwise” that bring together an ethnographic or place based approach with digital methods.[1] The workshop invites creative ways of addressing the digital that might be based on critical fabulations and fictions (Hameed, Genkel and O’Sullivan, 2018), on thinking through the materialities of technology as infrastructure (Starosielski, 2015), or through considering the vignette as a form of affective visual ethnography (Awan & Blackmore, 2024).[2]

Beyond a discussion on qualitative or quantitative methods, the workshop invites participants to reflect on the forms of knowledge their practice intervenes in. At a time when evidentiary practices have been positioned as an antidote to a “post-truth” world, how can we find other ways of knowing? Can affective forms of knowledge be mobilised through the digital, and what kinds of speculative urban worlds might this reveal?

The workshop invites participants to present a complete or in-progress spatial exploration that combines an ethnographic or situated approach with digital methods. Brief presentations of around 8-10 minutes will be followed by feedback and a roundtable discussion.

Nishat Awan is professor of architecture and visual culture at UCL Urban Laboratory (UK). Her research and writing focus diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. She led the ERC funded project, Topological Atlas, on the counter-geographies of migrants as they encounter the security apparatus of the border. Her book, Diasporic Agencies (Routledge, 2016) addressed how architecture and urbanism can respond to the consequences of increasing migration. She has written on alternative modes of architectural production in the co-authored book Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011) and the co-edited book Trans-Local-Act (aaa-peprav, 2011).

[1] Nishat Awan, ‘Mapping Otherwise: Imagining Other Possibilities and Other Futures’, in Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialism, Activism, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, ed. Ramia Mazé, Meike Schalk, and Thérèse Kristiansson (Baunach: AADR, 2017), 33–41.

[2] Henrietta Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed, and Simon O’Sullivan, eds., Futures and Fictions (London: Repeater, 2017); Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network, Sign, Storage, Transmission (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Nishat Awan and Kara Blackmore, ‘Vignettes as a Way of Seeing’ at ‘Undocumented?’ (Exhibition, Urban Room, UCL, 30 November 2023).