Monday, December 22, 2014

Urban Ornaments...the movie....

We - TACT - wish you with this clip a Happy Holiday Season and all the best for the New Year!

Thursday, December 18, 2014

CfP: German Congress of Geography

The German Geographic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geographie, DGfG) and the Geography Department of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin extend a cordial invitation to all geographers to participate in the German Congress of Geography in October 2015 in Berlin.
The Call for Papers is now open until 11 January 2015. You are invited to submit your papers to the sessions, which can be found here
http://dkg2015.hu-berlin.de/files/2014-10-08_dkg2015_call_eng.pdf


DKG 2015 Logo

Thursday, December 11, 2014

CFP: The Ideal City: between myth and reality – Urbino (Italy) – 27-29 August 2015

The Ideal City: between myth and reality – Urbino (Italy) – 27-29 August 2015

In the wake of globalization and State rescaling, cities are regaining relevance as social laboratories for new and innovative practices of social inclusion and participation. Within this trend cities are becoming again and more than ever a project. Policy‐makers, planners, inhabitants and mob le people build representations and idealizations that make a big part of the allure of urban life. Cities are imagined, made and remade “by design”. This has long tradition: from the grids of Roman cities to contemporary capitals like Brasilia, from Megalopolis like Shēnzhèn to living experiments like Soleri’s Arcosanti; from urban lives in the Renaissance to the Futurist vertical dreams; from, the 19th‐century garden cities to the current hype for smart cities.
For more visit: www.rc21.org/en/urbino2015

4th RC21-IJURR-FURS Summer School in Comparative Urban Studie


Research Committee 21 (RC21) of the International Sociology Association, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS) and the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Italy) invite applications for 25 places on our fourth collaborative School on Comparative Urban Studies, to be held in Urbino (Italy) from August 16th to September 2nd 2015. 
The School is being held in conjunction with the RC21 Conference on the theme of “The ideal city: between myth and reality. Representations, policies, contradictions and challenges for tomorrow’s urban life” to be held on August 27-29, 2015.

http://www.rc21.org/en/conferences/summerschool2015/

Summer School on Comparative Urban Studies – Urbino (Italy) – August 2015

Sunday, December 7, 2014

CfP: Multiple moralities and shadow economies in post-socialism: debating positive and negative incentives to tackle the informal economy

Marie Curie/IAPP Summer School: Zagreb 29 August " 1 September 2015
Call for applicants

In recent years, growing attention has been paid to fighting, or at
least controlling, incomes that are hidden from or unregistered by,
the state for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes.
Starting from the assumption that such non-compliance is not some
minority practice (according to an OECD report, of the global working
population of some three billion, nearly two-thirds - 1.8 billion -
work in the informal economy, see Jütting and Laiglesia, 2009) and
pushed by the need for governments to gather revenues to face the
economic crisis, the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27)
and Norway, as well as the EU Candidate countries, have been
earnestly seeking new policy measures to enable the formalization of
undeclared work (see EIRO, 2005; European Employment Observatory,
2004, 2007; Renooy et al, 2004; Williams and Renooy, 2009, 2013).

Two broad approaches have been distinguished towards undeclared work:
a deterrence approach which seeks to engender compliance by detecting
and punishing non-compliance, and an enabling approach which aims to
encourage compliance by either: preventing businesses or people from
engaging in undeclared work from the outset; providing incentives to
enable the transfer of undeclared work into the declared realm, or
facilitating commitment to ~tax moralityTM (Small Business Council,
2004; Williams and Renooy, 2009).

Conventionally, the deterrence approach was dominant across most
European countries. However, the recent crisis and recalculations of
the advantages of formalisation of informal economies have led to
rethinking the way to deal with undeclared economies. Rather than
seek to eradicate the undeclared economy, it is now becoming more
popular an approach to encourage the formalisation of undeclared
work.

Previous research from the GREY project (http://www.grey-
project.group.shef.ac.uk/) has suggested that the informal economy
may be higher the broader is the gap between individual and state
morality. Our understanding is that where a citizen does not see the
advantage of contributing to state development, or when s/e perceives
the state as unreliable, not giving but only taking, or not giving
enough, they are more likely to leave the game. In this respect,
economic actors may even perceive as oemoral  not contributing to the
state (and thus doing something stigmatised by state morality).
Indeed, there is an increasing amount of work in the informal economy
and the emergence of individual accounts that contrast with a state-
led view on individual morality (see, among others, Van Schendel &
Abrahams, 2005; Wanner, 2005, Morris, 2012; Morris & Polese, 2014;
Polese & Rodgers, 2011).

For this Summer School, we welcome the submission of early stage
researchers with empirically-based papers, based on recent research
by PhD students and early post-docs, as well as theoretically-rich
accounts on the relationship between the formal and the informal
economy, state-citizen dynamics and conflictual moralities.
Contributions may be on (but are not limited to):

Informal, undeclared, shadow, underground and unrecorded economic
activities

Tax evasion and tax non-compliance

Tax morality

Informal economies and governance

Informal economic practices and policy making

Suggestions on how to increase compliance among taxpayers, companies
and stakeholders

Moral foundations and alternative moralities of criminal or illegal
activities

Please submit 200 word abstracts and a short biographical statement
with your current position and affiliation  to:

iapp.summerschool@gmail.com
Deadline for abstract: 15 February 2015

Travel, board and lodging for the selected participants will be
covered by the organisers.

This summer school has been made possible thanks to a generous grant
from the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (grant
no. 611259)

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Funded PhD places available in Digital Humanities at University of Kent


The University of Kent is recruiting for new funded PhD places, to join in the 2015/16 academic year. We have a special interest in proposals for Digital Humanities, Digital Heritage, Spatial Humanities, and cross-disciplinary humanities research.

Eastern ARC is the new research consortium, uniting research capacity in the Digital Humanities and heritage at the universities of Kent, Essex, and UEA. At Kent we are particularly interested in proposals on past built environments, ancient cities, and comparative urbanism, among a few other key areas.
CHASE scholarships: 
CHASE is an Arts and Humanities (AHRC) funded doctoral training centre in which seven universities collaborate. Here we are particularly interested in interdisciplinary humanities research, certainly still including archaeological and historical disciplines and the Digital or Spatial Humanities.
50th Anniversary scholarships: 

Monday, December 1, 2014

Call for Proposals: Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Studies in Travel Writing, Taylor and Francis
Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Travelling and moving from one place to another have always been accompanied by some sort of need and desire to record experiences visually. According to McGrane, “To travel is to see – travel is essentially a way of seeing, a mode of seeing: it is grounded in the eye, in our visual capacity” (Beyond Anthropology).
It is through seeing that distant places, foreign people and objects seem to gain consistency. Through the years, sketches, watercolours, photography, film and digital media have framed and recorded every aspect of our movements and experiences of dislocation. What happens then when visual means and products (traditional and digital) come to influence or complement tales of displacement and mobility? In what way does the writing of present and past experiences of departure reflect and respond to visual images? How are issues of identity, gender, race and class expressed through the interlacing of words and images in travelogues? And how do the recording, display and narration of personal and collective experiences of travel provoke and encourage us to experiment with new ways of seeing and being?
We invite article proposals on visual elements of travel texts for a Special Issue of Studies in Travel Writing to be published in 2018. Articles will discuss the relationship between travel writing and visual media, within different geographical zones and historical contexts, in order to discuss and explore: how visual means evoke, engage with, comment on, or develop travel texts; in what way travel texts of any period respond to a visual aesthetic; how recent travel writing has engaged with new visual techniques (e.g. the DIGITAL CAMERA, new modes of image storage and processing etc.).
The following lines of enquiry are of particular interest (although other contributions are also welcome):
-       Representations of landscape; perceptions of urban and rural spaces;
-       Travel in extreme situations and hardship;
-       Written and visual narrations by people with disabilities and illnesses;
-       Children’s travels;
-       Women’s journeys;
-       Mystical and religious journeys;
-       Imagined journeys.
Proposals (in English and between 500-600 words) should be sent together with a brief biography to: giorgia.alu@sydney.edu.au, or sally.Hill@vuw.ac.nz by 16 December 2014.
Giorgia Alù (University of Sydney)
Sally Hill (Victoria University of Wellington)

Call for Chapters: Paris of the Periphery: The Parisian Image and the Making of Urban Modernity in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1850-1930

We invite submissions (in the form of a 1000-word abstract) for consideration as chapters in an edited volume exploring the many connections between Paris and the modernizing cities of Eastern Europe and Latin America in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (1850-1930).  Our objective is to reopen and reinvigorate the comparison of the borderlands of modern Western urbanity by bringing together the histories of cities on the continental and transatlantic periphery that were fashioned or imagined as regional Parises in miniature (“Paris of the East,” “Paris of South America,” “Paris of the Balkans,” “Paris of the Andes,” “Little Paris,” etc.) or that interpreted significant elements of their urban environment, experience, or culture through the prism of Paris.  We are particularly interested in going beyond the focus on urban planning alone in the consideration of this relationship.

Through a series of chapters on individual cities in either Eastern Europe or Latin America (see list below), the volume aims to explore the following clusters of questions:
• What did it mean to call an Eastern European or Latin American city the “Paris of…” its region?  Who fostered this association, when, and why?  (Groups to consider may include, but are not limited to:  politicians, businessmen, urban planners, architects, city officials, tourism officials, visiting travelers, immigrants, journalists, advertisers, students, artists, writers, playwrights, songwriters, bohemians, modernists, scientists, other local social/political elites.)  Did everyone mean the same thing when they used it?  How did its meaning change over time in a particular urban or national context?
• What historical changes in Eastern Europe or Latin America after 1850 encouraged locals to identify with or reject Paris as a model of urban modernity?  Were there political conflicts or transformations at the national level that encouraged or discouraged this association? Were they related to social or cultural changes within the city itself?  Were they fostered by growing personal networks or other transnational material connections to Paris?
• Which Paris served as the model for the implementation or interpretation of modernity in an Eastern European or Latin American city, when, and why?  The “City of Light”?  “Capital of Pleasures”?  Haussmann’s Second Empire or Beaux-Arts capital?  “Old Paris”?  Bohemian Paris?  Were there other general images of Parisian modernity that Eastern Europeans or Latin Americans used to map their own modern urban experience?  Other specific neighborhoods, streets, or architectural details in Paris that they saw or wanted to see echoes of in their own city?
• To what degree did urban planners, architects, and city officials in each Eastern European or Latin American city consciously seek to emulate Haussmann’s Parisian reforms or model their own urban environment after Paris specifically?  Were there other urban models of equal or greater importance for them?  Consciously or not, to what degree did they end up replicating the look of Paris in miniature?  To what degree were other changes or other people beyond their control responsible for the “Paris of…” association?
• How did local manifestations of modernism and nationalism shape the view of Paris as a model of cultural modernity over time?  Did they reinforce or break down this connection?  To what degree did new cultural actors such as bohemians, modernists, popular entertainers, or nationalist ideologues ridicule the pretention to make their home city more like Paris – or even ridicule Paris itself?  To what degree did architects, planners, and others look to national traditions or other kinds of modern cities (such as the North American skyscraper city) as a counterweight or alternative to the identification with Parisian modernity?  To what degree did they simply re-imagine Paris to better fit their own experiences and ambitions? 
Each of the book’s empirical chapters will focus on a single city, written by an expert on one of our two focus regions.  No contributor will be asked to make direct comparisons between Eastern Europe and Latin America in the course of his or her study.  Similarly, no proposed analytical focus is too narrow.  We will work with the selected participants to situate specific topics or periods of interest within the broader framework of the study.
As we already have authors working on Buenos Aires, Budapest, Prague, Quito and São Paulo, we are looking for further contributions exploring interactions with Paris in other Eastern European and Latin American urban contexts such as Athens, Bucharest, Belgrade, Caracas, Cracow, Havana, Lima, Mexico City, Montevideo, Odessa, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Warsaw, etc. Proposals for chapters on other capitals or large cities normally considered part of these two regions are welcome as well.
The deadline for chapter proposals is January 15, 2015.
After the completion of the review and selection process at the end of March 2015, the editors will submit a book proposal to several academic presses.
To submit a chapter proposal, please email both Dr. Brian Bockelman at bockelmanb@ripon.edu and Dr. Alexander Vari at vari@marywood.edu
Dr. Brian Bockelman
Department of History
Ripon College
300 W. Seward St.
Ripon, WI 54971 
Dr. Alexander Vari
Department of Social Sciences
Marywood University
2300 Adams Ave.
Scranton, PA 18509 

Online Database: Becoming Istanbul


Becoming Istanbul explores contemporary Istanbul through an interactive database of over 400 media. An up-to-date collection of artists' videos, photography series, documentaries, news reports, cartoons and architectural projects, the database is organized according to 80 concepts that instrumentalize typical discourses relating to the city and suggest new points of view. Its media include the visual productions of artists and researchers who have problematized actors and phenomena typically disregarded in urban discourse, as well as the declarations of decision makers involved in Istanbul’s current transformations.

http://database.becomingistanbul.org/

more at http://saltonline.org/en/30/istanbullasmak