CFP 26.05.2011

Frontiers: Topographies of Surveillance and Flows (SAH)

Detroit
Eingabeschluss : 01.06.2011

Carolyn Loeb, Michigan State University

We invite abstracts to be considered for this Society of Architectural Historians 2012 conference session in Detroit. If you are interested, please submit your abstract electronically by June 1 to www.sah.org/2012.

FRONTIERS: TOPOGRAPHIES OF SURVEILLANCE AND FLOWS

The character of its frontier zone is part of the genius locus of any border city. The frontier zone organizes an array of functions to facilitate the passage of goods, information, and people and to define and control access. The border is less an object, architectural or otherwise, than it is a context of specific structures and layouts that enables performance of this two-sided role. This session addresses the complexity of this simultaneity both historically and within the contemporary framework, as well as the multiple challenges to the concept of the border presented by globalization in its many forms.

Numerous features can be examined as constructing frontier zones. These can include barrier and checkpoint emplacements, terminals, and the topographies of surveillance that create no-man’s-lands or erect obstacles intended to control transit. Alternatively, and usually concurrently, there are bridges, enclaves, businesses, and other features that emphasize flows in both directions across the border. Signage, street names, and other uses of language contribute to both aspects of frontier zones.

Detroit offers an anchor for these investigations: noteworthy, for example, are its name (“strait”), acknowledging the navigable passage between it and Windsor; the connecting Ambassador Bridge, signaling an official formality in relations between Canada and the U.S. at this site of historical contestation; and the memorial to the Underground Railroad at the river’s edge, facing Windsor, recording the sanctuary once represented by the other side of the frontier. These references draw attention to the embodiment of memory in such charged topographies, in which contemporary tensions among the conditions of cosmopolitanism, tourism, migration, and displacement are negotiated in relation to both legacies of the past and globalization.

This session seeks to explore the global multiplicity of frontier topographies in their historical and political diversity and welcomes contributions from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Session chairs: Carolyn Loeb, Associate Professor, Art and Architectural History, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University; 517-884-1322; loebmsu.edu; and Andreas Luescher, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture and Environmental Design, Bowling Green State University; 419-372-0347;alueschbgsu.edu.

Quellennachweis:
CFP: Frontiers: Topographies of Surveillance and Flows (SAH). In: ArtHist.net, 26.05.2011. Letzter Zugriff 29.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/1448>.

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