Final programme (with links and abstracts)

Keynote speakers (updated)

Registration is free and now open here

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Our conference builds on recent contributions of literary scholarship on mobility (Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce) and is rooted in the “new mobilities” framework developed by the sociologists and geographers (Miloš N. Mladenović, Catherine N. Nash, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Mimi Sheller and John Urry). This framework is sensitive to the intersecting dimensions of power and discrimination that shape urban kinetic features. We invite scholars across disciplines and geographical contexts with an interest in examining how (im)mobility in the city is constructed and narrated by intersections of race, nationality, disability, class, gender, sexual orientation and other social categories and status markers. We are particularly interested in work that addresses liminal or queer identities, urban borderlands (alleyways, bridges, roads, borders between neighborhoods) and experiences that operate in or between peripheral urban environments, from post-industrial zones in capital cities to (sub)urban environments that are situated outside the canonized capitals of modernity and postmodernity. 

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With a focus on narratives (fictional or non-fictional), we welcome papers on the following topics:

- theoretical accounts of space and transport from an intersectional perspective

- the humanities turn in the “new mobilities” paradigm

- urban peripheries and their relation to different mobility regimes and practices

- (im)mobility, marginality and the core/periphery division

- ideologies of movement in the city

- urban queer mobilities

- environmental impacts of urban mobilities

- emerging urban mobility technologies and their representation

- new literary forms or genres to express new forms of mobility

- material and immaterial infrastructures of mobility and their impact on the production, dissemination, and consumption of literature

- narratives of border crossing and liminal urban spaces

- mobile urban sites

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The conference also seeks to create an open debate platform to rethink and enact research practices that are conscious of the politics and economics of unequal movement of knowledge. For this purpose, we will facilitate an online option for those participants who cannot or prefer not to travel to the venue. 

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Submissions:

Registration is free (opens September 1, 2021). To participate, please submit an abstract (300 words) with a short bio to fringe@uah.es by April 30, 2021. Notification of acceptance: end of May 2021. Languages: English or Spanish. Our call for abstracts is now closed. 

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Organizing Committee:

Patricia García (Universidad de Alcalá)

Lieven Ameel (Tampere University)

Fringe Urban Narratives: Peripheries, Identities, Intersections

Association for Literary Urban Studies

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Info: fringe@uah.es

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