Call for Papers
Translating Sea-Level Change in Urban Life: Policies, Practices and their Intersections in Island Southeast Asia
International Roundtable Symposium hosted by EMERSA – Epistemic Mobilities and the
Governance of Environmental Risks in Island Southeast Asia, a DFG-financed research project.
Jakarta, Indonesia, May 28/29 2018
The symposium ‘Translating Sea-Level Change in Urban Life’ aims to bring together researchers from the social sciences, the humanities and area studies with practitioners and policy-makers that work across a diverse range of themes relating to the lived and experiential aspects of (relative) sea-level change in Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from the recent ‘mobility’ and ‘translational’ turns across the social sciences and the
humanities, the event seeks to discuss how sea-level change dynamics in island and archipelagic megacities and other urban settings can be empirically studied and re-theorized beyond their mainstream articulations as sources of risk and ‘riskscapes.’
At its core, the symposium seeks to advance several nascent lines of inquiry that engage with how: a) diversely the amorphous notion of ‘sea-level change’ is interpreted across urban spaces; b) coastal societies in Southeast Asia are reconfiguring what it means to live with/out water in everyday life; c) policies and everyday social practices of living with/out water have been transforming contemporary urban life, and indeed the very
imaginaries and futures of ‘urbanity’ in island and archipelagic Southeast Asia.
The event is targeted at international researchers and scholars that work at the science-policy interface spanning a range of disciplines that include geography, sociology, anthropology, political science and environmental history. In particular, we welcome contributions that focus on how ways of living with water are being socio-culturally
translated in urban contexts. These may include topics such as:
- Imaginaries, contradictions, and broader material and discursive politics of coastal protection, mitigation and adaptation in Southeast Asian cities;
- Socio-political contestations in the making of ‘new’ knowledges, policies, and coastal justice concerns (e.g. in connection to the privatization of coastal spaces, gentrification, and urban displacement);
- Living with/out water: everyday discourses and practices that challenge and/or rupture mainstream modes of coastal life (e.g. artificial island reclamation, the refashioning of coastal lifestyles such as amphibious dwelling, ‘sea steading’ etc.);
- Futuring the Coastal Metropolis in policy and other socio-ecological and technological innovations.
The symposium will be organized in the form of a roundtable dialogue with pre-prepared extended abstracts. Particular emphasis will be placed on refining arguments and texts in preparation for an edited volume to be published with an international publishing house. For submission please send an abstract (max 250 words) and a short CV to Dr. Rapti Siriwardane (mail: rsi[at]zmt-bremen[dot]de) and Dr. Johannes Herbeck (herbeck[at]uni-bremen[dot]de). A limited number of travel stipends for speakers and contributors to the volume is available upon request.
Abstract submission deadline March 15, 2018
POLLEN 