International and interdisciplinary conference "Writing with ruins: Embodied encounters and creative narratives"

Call for papers until 15th January 2025

Dates: 21, 22, 23 May 2025 (in-person, full-day activity)
Organizers: Pablo Arboleda and Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez, Department of Anthropology – Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Institutional collaborator / venue: Intermediæ / Centre for Contemporary Creation Matadero-Madrid, Spain
Keynote speakers:
-    Thora Petursdottir, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History – University of Oslo, Norway
-    Justin Armstrong, Writing Program / Department of Anthropology – Wellesley College, USA
-    Hayden Lorimer, School of Geosciences – University of Edinburgh, UK.

Conference description

Modern ruins are the material legacies resulting from obsolete paradigms and a series of socioeconomic, political and environmental changes that have taken place in contemporary times. In the popular imagination, a ruin is what remains whenever a society reinvents itself, and, since the tangible appearance of architectural abandonment tends to disturb our deeply ingrained aesthetic standards, ruins are commonly perceived as undesirable, uncomfortable spaces—even as sources of embarrassment subjected to taste (Orange 2008). In this sense, over the past decade, the concept of ‘ruin’ has increasingly positioned itself as a figure of social critique, capable of challenging the omnipresent order of a capitalist world and its dominant narratives of transformative progress (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013); however, acknowledging the ruin as a growing reality, it can also be argued that its visibility has increased and its meaning has evolved, giving rise to new forms of valuation and appreciation. Thus, modern ruins are increasingly celebrated for their distinctively immersive atmospheres and, more significantly, they are becoming a prime epistemic space from which to collectively contemplate how to inhabit the collapse of many of our infrastructures in order to rebuild alliances, reintegrate communities, and rethink alternative futures (Göbel 2021). Accordingly, this conference seeks to embrace the ambivalent nature of ruins—always fluctuating between tragedy and fascination, frustration and hope, memory and futurity—until we come to understand them as a broad cultural asset intricately tied to the most pressing contemporary issues and responses, such as deindustrialization and crises, urban struggles, participatory and sustainable space reclamation, the weaving of care networks, gender diversity and migration, climate crisis and natural disasters, rural depopulation, new interspecies relations, armed conflicts, historical memory, and emerging practices of collective grief and imagination.

At the same time, numerous and varied disciplines and research practices have addressed the wide range of themes expressed here, making it evident that the modern ruin—due to the phenomenological possibilities it offers—is one of the spatial typologies where the physical experience and bodily dimension of those who step into them manifest with the greatest intensity. The translation of these moments of interaction into written language has yielded some of the most beautiful and innovative examples that academic literature has produced (i.e. Armstrong 2011; Lorimer and Murray 2015; Petursdottir 2016). Enriched by (auto)ethnographic vignettes, travel narratives, creative prose, and poetry, the dialogue established with ruins challenges theoretical obscurantism, making these stylistic resources based on the senses, gestures, and emotions scientifically relevant in their own right. Building on this generative approach, this conference explores the fruitful intersection between ‘non-representational theory’, which avoids cold and objective documentation in favor of the performative, imaginative, and speculative nature of fieldwork (Vannini 2015), and ‘multimodal experiments’ that seek to elucidate how the researcher both affects and is affected by their surroundings. These experiments aim to test new evocative ways of mediating those encounters into a compelling and genuinely suggestive and inspiring form—thus redefining what we could understand as ‘open access’ for an audience beyond academia (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019).

Application guidelines and selection criteria

This in-person, full 3-day conference is being organized in collaboration with Intermediæ, and will be held between 21-23 May 2025 at the facilities of the Centre for Contemporary Creation Matadero-Madrid—a former slaughter-house that remained operative until the end of the 20th century, and one of the most important cultural venues in Spain today.

We welcome applications reckoning with a wide variety of topics related to modern ruins, drawing from disciplines such as anthropology, human geography, contemporary archaeology, architecture, arts, critical heritage studies, urban studies, and more. Specifically, we are interested in storytelling techniques and thought-provoking reflections that emerge from immersive fieldwork and practice-based experiences. We value atmospheric accounts and vivid descriptions that implicitly engage with theory, even when bibliographical references are kept to only the essentials.

Applications must be addressed until 15th January 2025 to Pablo Arboleda and Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez (pablo.arboleda@cchs.csic.es; Cc: isa_gs86@hotmail.com) with the email subject ‘Writing with Ruins – application’. This email must contain an attached single-page PDF file that will include (1) provisional title, (2) 300-word abstract describing the study case, main ideas and concepts, and the creative writing approach to be employed, and (3) short bio of no more than 100 words.

Due to scheduling limitations, we can only accept a maximum of 27 applications. The selection criteria will prioritize the quality and originality of the submitted proposals while also ensuring a balance across academic disciplines, study case typologies, writing styles, and authors’ gender, international backgrounds, and stages in their academic careers. Applicants will be notified with a decision on 22nd January 2025 at latest.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Since the ultimate goal of the conference is the publication of an edited volume within the book series of a leading academic publisher, authors’ contributions must refer to original parts of their research that remain unpublished so far. To discuss the extent of your submission, or in case you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contacting Pablo Arboleda and Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez (pablo.arboleda@cchs.csic.es; Cc: isa_gs86@hotmail.com).

References
- Armstrong, J. 2011. ‘Everyday Afterlife’, Cultural Studies 25(3), pp. 273–293.
- Dattatreyan, E. and I. Marrero-Guillamón. 2013. ‘Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention’, American Anthropologist 121(1), pp. 220–228.
- DeSilvey, C. and T. Edensor. 2013. ‘Reckoning with Ruins’, Progress in Human Geography 37(4), pp. 465–485.
- Göbel, H. 2021. ‘Making Cultural Values out of Urban Ruins: Re-enactments of Atmospheres’, Space and Culture 24(3), pp. 408–420.
- Lorimer, H. and S. Murray. 2015. ‘The Ruin in Question’, Performance Research 20(3), pp. 58–66.
- Orange, H. 2008. ‘Industrial Archaeology: Its Place within the Academic Discipline, the Public Realm and the Heritage Industry’, Industrial Archaeology Review 30(2), pp. 83–95.
- Petursdottir, T. 2016. ‘For Love of Ruins’, in T. F. Sørensen and M. Bille (eds.) Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Spaces, pp. 365–386. London: Routledge.
- Vannini, P. 2015. ‘Non-representational Research Methodologies: An Introduction’, in P. Vannini (ed.) Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research, pp. 1–18. London: Routledge.