Call for Papers for 4 Panels (See extended calls below):

1. Art and Identity
2. Performing Identity: The Relationship between Identity and Performance in Literature, Theatre and the Performing Arts
3. Identities and the Cities: Urban Transformations, Transition and Change in Urban Image Construction
4. Identity in the Visual

The panels are part of the 7th Euroacademia International Conference ‘Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities’
14 – 15 June 2018, Lucca, Italy

Deadline: 7th of May 2018

1. CfP for the Panel: Art and Identity, Lucca, Italy, 14 – 15 June 2018

Panel Description:
Identities are socially attributed imaginary significations. They are part of the dynamic projects of individual and social autonomy (C. Castoriadis). Nothing shapes, represents or reflects better the imaginary constructions of particular societies than arts. The artistic perception and practice are often identity making processes while the object of art can be a direct or indirect embodiment of experienced identities. At the outcome line of the process of artistic creation, the perception of the objects of art as oeuvre is an identification with cultural claims for specific aesthetic standards.

Art has a tremendous impact in indicating or shaping various dimensions of multilayered identities. Trough time art represented or influenced human visions of life and death, natural or supra-natural, meanings of life and daily practices, beliefs and their expression, history and change, places and differences. Art is simultaneously a process of building contextual cultural identifications and an instrument for cross-cultural dialogue. Arts supported the symbolic legitimating of various political orders and had an essential role in the creation of national identities. Arts shaped cultural aspirations and credos as an effective element of cultural innovation, change and openness to new. Through imaginary representations, art inserted divisions and differences among cultures and self-perceptions of people yet also opened the path of curiosity for the other and the emergence of trans-cultural dialogue. As artistic visions touched upon the most intimate identitarian representations of individuals and societies, they exercise a fundamental role in the developments and dynamics of identity making processes. Arts deeply touched on social and self-representation through sculpture and portraiture, on civic identities through defining social spaces in architecture or quotidian perceptions through design, on social or political allegiances through symbols, iconic objects and cultural diplomacy, on acting identities through theater, literature or performance arts, on the formation of transnational and global symbols. They exercised an essential impact on the formation of social memories or in addressing inclusion and exclusion nexuses for the marginalized or oppressed. Art is as well one of the important modes for asserting identities.

This panel addresses explicitly and invites the theoretical or applied studies that relate artistic manifestations with identity making processes. As the universe of reflection and research on the topics involved are virtually unlimited and impossible to anticipate in full diversity, we welcome contributions that add value or challenges to the discussion of the topic.

Some suggested topics for the panel are:
~ Art and identity: a bidirectional influence
~ Arts and the formation of social imaginary
~ Art as search for self-expression and identity
~ History, memory, art and identity: from literature to visual and performing arts
~ Renaissance and humanism influence on modern identity
~ Art and the creation of national identities
~ Modern art and novelty as a value
~ Portraiture and identity: from painting to sculpture and photography
~ Performing identities: identity and performance in literature, theatre and the performing arts
~ The body in art
~ Photography and identity making: from single images to serial portraits
~ Identity and migration or displacement in art
~ Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi: the human and the absolute
~ Picasso and Modigliani: images of a deeper self
~ Cindy Sherman: the nature of representation and construction of identity
~ Architecture and urban vision: from civic identities to globalization
~ Contemporary design and the visions of life and the self
~ Displaying allegiance: from ideological art to political symbols
~ Fashion and social staging of personal identity
~ Cinematography and identitarian representations
~ Art and cross-cultural dialogue
~ Art and post-colonialism
~ Art and search for recognition: expressing cultural heritage
~ Art, infinite reproduction and the global village
~ Museums, galleries and exhibitions: displaying identities
~ Art as cultural diplomacy

2. CfP for the Panel: Performing Identity: The Relationship between Identity and Performance in Literature, Theatre and the Performing Arts, Lucca, Italy, 14 - 15 June 2018

Panel Proposed by: Dr. Panayiota Chrysochou, The University of Cyprus

Panel Description:
Identity is often seen as being a controversial topic. Whether it is fictive or real, (de)politicized and/or aesthetic, gendered or engendered, identity is often seen as being a powerful political tool and an essentially social construct. It also allows individuals to define themselves. In a sense, we perform our own identities everyday - or, perhaps, we perform a wide range of different identities at any one time. We implicitly live in a society which constructs various definitive identifications, and which often sees the rigid maintenance of hierarchical systems and exclusive ideological constructions of gender, identity and sexuality, or what Judith Butler defines in her work Bodies that Matter as an 'exclusionary matrix.' This has often resulted in the displacement of any discursive systems which resist these exclusionary systems. This panel seeks to give voice to discursive systems which have so often been displaced by exclusionary systems of identification. The main exclusionary focus in culture and the arts has often been on the white, heterosexual and supremacist male (or female). To rectify this oversight, this panel seeks to address any works of art and culture which are directly and explicitly related to the performance of identity from a different standpoint - that is, one which is not exclusively heteronormative and heterosexual.

We welcome any papers focusing non-exclusively on the following topics:

- Identity as a performative and political tool and/or as a site of political resistance and change
- Performance as an identitarian act
- The work of gay/lesbian or drag performance artists who do not form part of the white, male/female and heterosexual/heteronormative matrix
- Identity as a fluid and shifting construct in the theatre, the performing arts and literature generally
- Cultural and literary works or works of art which resist fixed identifications and engender performative meanings/ways of 'reading'
- The abject as a site of identification
- Gender and identity formation
- Sexuality as a performative and identificatory construct or mode of identification.

3. CfP for the Panel: Identities and the Cities: Urban Transformations, Transition and Change in Urban Image Construction, Lucca, 14 - 15 June 2018

Panel Description:

Urban image construction is a reflection, expression and constitutive factor of local identity formation and dynamics. Cities simultaneously localize identities and connect them with wider global signs of utility, function and symbolic order. Elasticity of the label identity accommodates everything that surrounds us as presence or absence, persistence or change. As a theatrical scenery, cities change after each act, sometimes with discrete adaptations, sometimes with radical interventions. If the scenery is composed of streets, parks, roads, museums, monuments, shopping malls and buildings connected through the intricate network of the perpetual and cumulative actions of its inhabitants, every adaptation and intervention affects its multi-dimensional identities. Changes in urban visual identities unfold as a form of public art feeding from the immense potential of social imaginary significations accommodated by a time’s perception of stability, structure and continuity. Urban change is itself a production of meaning, interpretation and identity making practices.

As the chaotic canvases of cities are being stretched over a framework of identity, its further exploration seems more than appropriate. Amidst the incredibly rapid urban growth crowding more than half of the world population in towns and cities, the questions are only going to keep multiplying. How are city identities made and re-made, used and abused, imagined and narrated, politicised and communicated, expressed and projected, imposed and marketed? And above all, how do they thrive within the dynamic interpolation of the nexus of local-global, centre-periphery, urban - suburban, old and new. As out-dated as these dichotomies may sound, in many places their daily life is far from over. As old cities became new capitals and new capitals struggle for more capital, the challenges of maintaining public-driven collective identities in the face of cultural fragmentation and diversification, coupled with consumer-attractiveness is turning them into urban palimpsests. Urban environments reflect the human needs and values. In an increasingly globalized world, the human beings are becoming more citizens of the world than citizens of the cities. The increasing mobility of the new pilgrims of globalization creates more of the same in the logic of universalized urban functionality. Within this logic, the cities are now in the position to re-evaluate their impact on the world and shape their future in a manner that assumes a wider responsibility that evades a localized mentality. Urban local identities are becoming increasingly thin and rely strongly on negotiating a local specificity with universalized functionality and global responsibility. An increasing need for uniqueness and distinctiveness foster site-specificity aimed at placing a particular urban identity within a global economic hierarchy. Public art became essential for affirming distinctive local urban identities in a universe of serialization and commodification.

As the research on cultural identities of the city is becoming more abundant, this panel aims at adopting a wide-lens inter-disciplinary approach, while focusing on various processes affecting identities in the urban context in its global-regional-national-local interplay.

Some example of topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Collective Memory, Identity and Urban Image Construction
• Appropriation, Instrumentalisation and Functualisation of Public Spaces
• Contemporary Nomadism and the City as a Common Denominator for Collective Identities
• Architecture as ‘Politics with Bricks and Mortar’
• History, Heritage and Urban Change
• Urban Regeneration Projects, Landmark Buildings and ‘Starchitects’
• Non-Places and (Non)Identity
• Immigrants and the Cultural Identity of Cities
• City Marketing and City Branding
• Cities and Public Goods
• European Capitals of Culture and European Identity
• Cities and Sites of Memorialisation
• Identity Creation and the Cultural Offer of the City
• Urban Cultural Heritage as Identity-Anchor
• Minor Places: Dominant Culture and Site-Specific Urban Identities
• Creative Changes of the Cities
• Art and Industry in Urban Development
• Urban Aesthetics
• Urban Installations
• Critical Architecture
• Urbanism and Social Intervention: Inclusion of the Marginalized
• Centre/Periphery Nexuses in Contemporary Urban Development
• Cities and the Quality of Life
• Urban Landscapes and Sustainable Cities
• Contemporary Cities and Environmental Responsibility
• Ugliness, Kitsch and Value in Shaping Contemporary Urban Spaces
• Urban Sites of Identification
• Temporary Urban Interventions
• Architecture as Public Art

4. CfP for the Panel: Identity in the Visual, Lucca, Italy, 14 - 15 June 2018

Panel Proposed by: Daniela Chalániová (Anglo-American University, Prague)

Panel Description:
Ever since the so called ‘linguistic turn’ in the 1970s, majority of research on identity in political and social sciences has been focused on language and text - as language has been considered the primary tool for meaning formation, and ideas exchange. Today, we are twenty years from a digital revolution of the 1990s, which on the one hand, made communication faster, more efficient and more global, on the other hand made the linguistic exchange just one of many possibilities. While arguably some visual elements such as symbols and flags have been recognized as important for collective identification, the impact of journalist, fashion and travel photography, films, comic books and documentaries, billboards and brands, sports and arts has largely been neglected by mainstream political science scholars, who viewed images as something rather suspicious. However, with increasing interest in the visual/aesthetic aspects of political and social life (the so called ‘visual/aesthetic turn’ of the late 1990s) it is only logical to take a hard look at identity beyond language, that is, from an interdisciplinary visual perspective.

Images, just like words, are able to communicate norms, meanings and values, they polarize as well as unite communities, identify who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. Images communicate meanings through logic of association, rather than logic of argumentation as texts often do, appealing to our emotional rather than logical cognition. Images trigger the unconscious processes of stereotyping and value judgments associated with them, effectively constructing affiliation or differentiation, a Self and the Other, with behavioural consequences. Therefore, analysis of visual material in connection to identity should occupy a more prominent place among identity scholars. Political and social science, however, lacks in tools of visual analysis, therefore it needs to broaden its scope into other disciplines such as communication studies, artsand history, cultural studies, media studies, theatre, iconography, semiotics, marketing and advertising, public relations, fashion, photography, cinematography, etc.

Thus, this panel aims at a more inclusive interdisciplinary approach to identity building, especially in terms of the empirical scope. The goal is to collect empirical as well as theoretical and methodological papers on political and social identity, focused on visual aspects of identity construction.

Suggested topics may include/but are not limited to these:
~ Role of images in multilingual collectivities’ identity construction
~ Role of images in multicultural/multinational collectivities’ identity construction
~ Role of sports as visual performance in identity narratives
~ Emotional appeal of images, symbols and representations
~ American presidential election and the public ‘image’ of the candidates
~ Presidential election and the public ‘image’ of the candidates
~ Constructing the democrats/the republicans in the media
~ Political branding and electoral campaigns
~ Media campaigns of the European Parliament
~ Statues and monuments of national identity
~ Treatment of minorities in films – visualizing the Other
~ National cinema and national identity
~ Images of patriotism
~ Fashion statement as a declaration of belonging
~ Folk costumes and clothing in contemporary national identity narratives
~ Visualizing the gender

While the papers suggested here approach identity from a social-constructivist perspective, other approaches and criticisms are welcome.
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If interested in participating and presenting in the conference, please read the complete event details on the conference website and apply on-line. Alternatively you can send a maximum 300 words abstract together with the details of your affiliation until 7th of May 2018 by e-mail at applicationeuroacademia.org

For full details of the conference and on-line application please see:
http://euroacademia.eu/conference/7th-identities-and-identifications/