Tagungen & Konferenzen | Conferences

Queer (Second) Cities

August 30-31, 2023 | Online

The molly houses of London, the lesbian salons of Paris, the queer club scene of Berlin: LGBTQIA2S+ spaces are frequently considered urban and Western by default. Queer community in physical space is therefore often mapped onto a very limited number of metropolises, pushing rural queerness, the global South, queer periphery and queer second cities to the margins. Jack Halberstam’s critique of metronormativity (In a Queer Time and Place, 2005) as “the conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ in many normalizing narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivities” (36) can thus be further specified as referring to particular kinds of urban spaces and excluding others. In this symposium, we invite you to share your research on queer spaces outside of or on the margins of the metropolis, the communities that build and use these spaces, the infrastructures and practices they employ to do so, the cultures that shape queer second cities, and the ways in which all of the above are portrayed in literature, audiovisual media, the news, visual arts and any other media. Vice versa, we are also interested in how queer discourses and narratives shape urban and non-urban space.

Where the term ‘second city’ may describe inferiority in relation to a first, primary, or alpha city along quantifiable terms such as population, economic production, or city size, we use the term akin to Ameel, Finch and Salmela’s wider definition in Literary Second Cities (2017): “Secondary cities have become increasingly defined in terms of their function, their relationships with metropolitan and other urban centers, as well as in terms of the specific kinds of urban experiences they enable” (6). Queer second cities may then be cities that are less prominent than capital cities but well-known for being hubs of LGBTQIA2S+ communities: Philadelphia, Brighton, Cologne, Montreal, São Paulo, Bologna, or Portland. Or they could be relatively small cities, towns, or villages with an extremely high queer population, such as Cherry Grove on Fire Island, Skala Eressos on Lesvos, Hebden Bridge or Provincetown. There may also be a link between post-industrial cities, such as Manchester, Leeds, and Portsmouth, and queerness. Tel Aviv, Taipei or Bangkok are capital (and thereby ‘first’) cities that are well-known for their queer communities but are, despite their size and status, frequently marginalized as non-Western. Quintana-Vallejo (2021) additionally suggests a link between queer diasporic writing and second cities.

We also want to explore potential feminist and gender transgressive notions of the ‘second’, relating ‘second cities’ to Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Butler’s reading of Beauvoir as providing a new and radical understanding of gender and gender performance. Thought of as a verb, ‘to second’ can express support and agreement, bringing community and unity back to a term that may otherwise sound deceptively binary. We invite you to think of queer second cities as any spatial configurations that transgress, queer and question normative assumptions and majority-oriented positions, including rural and peripheral geographies.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Davy Knittle (University of Delaware) and Jas M. Morgan (Toronto Metropolitan University)

_{References:
Ameel, Lieven; Jason Finch and Markku Salmela. Literary Second Cities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Classics, 2015.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press, 2005.
Quintana-Vallejo, Ricardo. “Mapping Queer Diasporas in Literary Second Cities: Benjamín Alire
Sáenz, Gabby Rivera, and Ocean Vuong.” Literary Geographies 7.2 (2021): 275-291.}

Archive

Culture at Play: Avatars, Players, and Others

March 10-11, 2023 | Zoom

Scholarly work on video games has often located a major part of the player experiences within the exploration of gameworlds. This was one of the main frameworks under which the last year’s conference, Culture at Play: Spaces - Colours - Stories, offered a platform for an interdisciplinary discussion of video games.

In this follow-up, Culture at Play: Avatars, Players, and Others, we aim to focus on the characters as interlocutors of these much-investigated environments by shifting the debate on the relationships between players and the characters they take the roles of, as well as those they encounter during play.

Keynote speakers: 

Richard Bartle (University of Essex), Lena Falkenhagen (UE Hamburg), Sarah Stang (Brock University)

Conference program:

FRIDAY, MARCH 10

SATURDAY, MARCH 11

PDF-Version

To register as an audience member please send an email to cultureatplay@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de indicating your name and institution.

Presentation abstracts:

Please find the PDF-Version of the presentation abstracts here.

About the conference:

Culture at Play: Avatars, Players, and Others is an international conference organized by the English Department at the University of Freiburg, and a follow-up to last year’s Culture at Play: Spaces – Colours – Stories in Digital Games. The conference series aims to open up a space that allows for sophisticated, critical analyses of video games and the cultural field that has emerged around them using an interdisciplinary approach that includes cultural, literary, and media studies.

The conference will take place on March 10 - 11, 2023 via Zoom.

Organizing Committee: Kübra Aksay, Janna Kaiser, Florian Schäfer

Previous iterations:

The conference proceedings of Culture at Play: Spaces – Colours – Stories in Digital Games were compiled by Sofia Guimarães, Dion Weidenhammer and Larissa Rell and published in Paidia - Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung on April 27, 2022. You can access the proceedings (in German) here.

The Long Night of Anglicists

November 25, 4-10 pm | Online

On the 25th of November, the Long Night of Anglicists will take place! Brace yourselves for an evening full of lectures, workshops, and presentations prepared by English teachers from all over Poland. This is a unique event and the main goal is to show the thoughts and scientific potential of English studies in Poland, as well as to unravel myth that English studies is only about language learning.

There will be plenty of online events to attend and participation is free for everyone. To find out more about the specific lectures, workshops, and presentations, please visit the event's website.

Connectivity and its Other | International Conference

July 2, 2022

The ubiquity of digital connectivity and the subsequent diminishing of human connection have become truths of our time. This conference starts with the assumption that digital overload takes a toll on people’s ability to connect meaningfully with themselves or with others. As many studies have shown hyperconnectivity can lead to self-centered thinking, narrow-mindedness, and a lack of empathy. The attendant mindset can and often does propel contemptuous forms of social interaction.

While the downsides and risks of hyperconnectivity are well known and widely lamented, contemporary media criticism explores moments of “digital disentanglement,” i.e. users' deliberate strategies to disconnect. This would constitute a resistance or alternative to hyperconnectivity. The “other” of hyperconnectivity then does not only refer to forms of othering (e.g. cyberhate and populist vitriol), which drive polarization and undermine democratic and civil culture.

In this conference we will examine already existent counter-strategies such as digital minimalism, digital self-defense and the digital detox movement as well as the booming mindfulness movement and the emerging academic field of critical digital literacy that train (mental) skills to curtail the harmful effects of hyperconnectivity.

Organized by Prof. Dr. Sieglinde Lemke

From Racial Polarization to Black Liberation | Symposium

February 3, 2021 | Online

Prof. Dr. Sieglinde Lemke and Luvena Kopp, M.A. are the organizers of a symposium which looks into the current Black movement, its repercussions and its potential to further social transformation. Guest speakers will be Priscilla Layne, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Dr. Nicole Hirschfelder (University of Tübingen), and Courtney Moffett-Bateau, M.A. (University of Bremen).

Black Lives Matter has become the rallying cry of the largest protest movement in U.S. history. As people from various nations and races have joined its protests, the movement has become an indispensable force of social change. This comes at a time of extreme polarization, propelled by increasing political partisanship, wherein rising levels of violence, animosity, and contempt towards members of the other group exacerbate divisions in U.S. society. The recent upsurge of Black Lives Matter, in an era of COVID-19, exposes long-standing racial as well as economic polarization. Expediting the structures of neoliberal capitalism, the pandemic reinforces the precarity of the many while increasing profits for the few. As the pandemic converges with a tradition of racist police brutality, Black lives are the main victims of a dual crisis.

The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement links the struggle for Black liberation to a broader struggle for systemic change. "Black liberation," Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reminds us in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, "is bound up with the project of human liberation and social transformation."

Law and Literature from a Narratological Perspective | International Conference

May 6 – 8, 2021 | Online

Organized by Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik and Prof. Dr. Frank L. Schäfer. A program from the conference can be found here.

26^th EARS Meeting (English and American Rhenish Scholars)

December 3, 2021 | Université Haute-Alsace Mulhouse
Following the meeting, a festive dinner at the Auberge du Zoo was offered by the UHA

Culture at Play: Spaces – Colours – Stories in Digital Games

March 4 – 5, 2022 | Online

Over the last few decades, video games have left their marginal position in culture and turned into a central experience that holds a permanent place in the lives of many people.

At the same time, they have also grown ever more sophisticated in content as well as audio-visual quality.

As a result, it is not only increasingly important to give them the serious consideration they deserve, but also that this happens in a manner that can do justice to their unique, multimedia mode of expression.

The conference is aiming to open up a space that allows for a sophisticated analysis of video games and the cultural field that has emerged around them using an interdisciplinary approach that includes, cultural, literary, and media studies.

You can find the program for the event, which will be continuously updated, here.