LUCAS Graduate Conference 2017

02/02/2017

The Arts in Society blog provides a platform for researchers affiliated with the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS)

01/02/2017

Dear conference participants,

the call for papers for the upcoming issue of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference (JLGC) is out. We strongly encourage you to submit your papers from the conference and get published! The journal is peer-reviewed and open-access.

You find the call for papers in the link below.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

The LUCAS Graduate Conference will provide a platform for PhD students in the humanities to present and exchange their ideas.

31/01/2017

Research Institute for the study of Arts in Society, focusing on art and material culture, and the study of literature.

30/01/2017

Thank you very much for these two great days we had!
We hope you enjoyed as much as we did.

25/01/2017

Would you like to attend the conference as a listener by you missed the deadline for registering online?
You can still register tomorrow (Thursday) morning at our desk in the Lipsius hall, from 8:30 to 9:15.

25/01/2017

Are you ready?

The conference starts this evening, with the lecture "Land-shaping: Land art and the Dutch polder landscape" by Dr. Anja Novak.

17:00 - 19:00, room Lipsius 147
It is open to the public and everyone is welcome!

Full abstract here: https://goo.gl/fLGBXR

24/01/2017

Bad News/Good News

Unfortunately, for personal reasons Professor Mitchell has been forced to cancel his lecture at the conference. We are all very sad that we will not have the opportunity to hear him speak but we are very pleased to announce that an exciting new lecture has been added to our programme:

Checking In: Placemaking and Digital Activism, by Dr. Elizabeth Losh.
Friday, 27 January, 15:40-16:55 | Lipsius/011

Abstract:
Critics of so-called “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” argue that the material and embodied conditions of occupying public space are necessary for social movements to effect real political change. While acknowledging the importance of bodies at risk and countable members of the body politic that demonstrate the impact of representative democracy, this talk looks at recent sites of digital media activism to claim that legitimate forms of co-presence can be constituted through platforms of computer-mediated communication. From Facebook check-ins in solidarity with tribes protesting the pipeline at Standing Rock to the geolocation of recent anti-Trump women’s marches around the globe, users of computational media often identify themselves with specific landmarks or geographical areas to register their participatory presence. Of course, the interventions of so-called “phoneurs” who cruise the built environment of cities can be disruptive to the sanctity of memorial spaces, whether it be users of the sexual hook-up app Grindr or of the game application Pokémon Go.

More information here: https://goo.gl/SIJusj

23/01/2017

What to expect from the conference:
Panel 16: Landscape Design

Paper “Performing (in) the Blurred Borders of the Landscape Practice” by Miguel Costa

This presentation aims to reflect on other ways of understanding the landscape by introducing temporary and small-scale projects as a fieldwork strategy as well as using the contribution of different practices and knowledge for its ex*****on and implementation. From this point of view, we are looking to the blurring of the borders between practices that are not necessary attached to the core of the landscape tradition. The goal is to discuss the results of these approaches made by artists or by different collaborations between arts and other sciences in order to engage the communities with the urban landscape matters.

23/01/2017

What to expect from the conference:
Panel 14: Glitches and Pixels – Digital (Re)makings of Landscape

Paper “Ideological Maps and Colliders with Context: Remediations of Landscape in Computer Games” by Peter Nelson

This presentation positions computer games as a paradigm medium for landscape. By combining methodologies from landscape and computer game studies, it provides new perspectives on the types of landscapes being produced, and how they characterise relations to the physical environment. As the complexity of digital environments and their cultural position expands, it is crucial that their use of existing landscape strategies is scrutinised, lest such environments be considered historically or politically benign. This presentation questions whether the abstraction of the computer simulation creates an ideology of landscape, and what historical narratives of landscape are reproduced explicitly and implicitly.

22/01/2017

What to expect from the conference:
Panel 13: Contested Ground – (Re)imagining the Colonial Landscape

Paper “Kanaima’s Mythscapes in Wilson Harris” by Gabriel Neiva

This paper proposes a reading of “Kanaima” by the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris ([1964] 1974) through the lens of ethnographical accounts of the area. The notion of kanaima,a challenging and polysemic Guianese Amerindian concept that refers to revenge enacted by predation and death, is appropriated by Wilson Harris to construct his thriller narrative, embodying the “mythscapes” and the “discourse of silence” proposed by ethnographers. The connection between landscape and kanaima is profound in the narrative of Wilson Harris, as its elements reinforce the Amerindian cosmology, creating a singular chronotopeof the Amazonian savannas in South Guyana.

21/01/2017

What to expect from the conference:
Panel 13: Contested Ground – (Re)imagining the Colonial Landscape

Paper “Contested Ground: British Power. Irish Territory.” by Feargal Fitzpatrick

This paper’s focus is on six images produced by Captain Henry Craigie Brewster in 1842-43, while stationed as a British army officer in southern Ireland. The oldest known surviving photographs shot in Ireland, his images feature in the Brewster Album, held at the Getty Museum in Malibu, California. Its Irish Calotypes have been described as a ‘mini-chapter’ in the early history of experimental photography. These images function as disruptive visual counterpoints to the aesthetic backdrop of romantic landscape painting and the political context of rising Irish cultural nationalism – a nascent ideology shaping Irish political identities over the next 175 years.

21/01/2017

What to expect from the conference:
Panel 10: Sacred Land – The Function of Landscape in Religious Texts

Paper “As the fabulous report goeth: Reconstructing and Deconstructing Landscape in Sixteenth-Century England” by Emily Mayne

This paper establishes the relationship between space and classical mythology in sixteenth-century English writing. It examines selected classical geographical texts, and shows that these were key sources not only for information about classical mythology, but also for ways of writing about it. It therefore suggests that early modern allusion to mythology is best understood as a spatialized textual activity. The paper substantiates its claims through a close reading of Hercules in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).