EAHN Urban Representations Group.

Capturing Urban Emotions.

Cities around the globe have always faced challenges as they grew: as they became home to new generations of citizens and those joining from elsewhere; as they became more and more entangled with national and politically motivated ambitions; as they became sites of commemoration and historic preservation or erasure; and as they introduced new infrastructures of transport and sanitation or faced environmental threats.

Considering cities in such periods of transformation and change, we solicit papers that analyze critically the capacity of visual representations of any time period or geography to convey the emotions that such challenges evoke: hope and anticipation, but also fear, prejudice and anxiety. We welcome short, focused presentations that meaningfully relate your site of study to the expression of emotion through urban representations. What emotions have prompted the production of a city image? How does that emotional expression reflect, deny, overlook, or resist biases, distortions, and manipulations? What values or motivations animate the emotional content of the image and how has that affected its form and use? To what extent can the image, whether map, perspectival view, painting, photo, film, etc. be used as a means to understand the nature and perhaps the essence of the city? Or has the image contributed toward an ephemeral, transitional, or fragmented urban identity?

Proposals should be no longer that 250 words.
Please submit your proposal with a short bio and 1-2 sentences about your proposed topic by Sunday, January 7, 2024.

Contact:
Miriam Paeslack, Paeslack[at]buffalo.edu
Ines Tolic, ines.tolic[at]unibo.it