This conference looks really interesting – but not sure I can cope with three transatlantic flights in early 2012.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The 2012 Telos Conference:
Space: Virtuality, Territoriality, and Relationality

January 14-15, 2012
New York City

Every day we see examples of how the Internet has released us from the bounds of our spatial rootedness and opened up new virtual landscapes for people all over the world. Everything near and far has become equally accessible, and spatial distance is no longer the limitation that it once was. But as much as the Internet and new forms of social networking have transformed our relationship to physical space, both political events and economic crises have also reaffirmed the importance of territory, sovereignty, and land in determining the conditions in which people live their daily lives. The preeminence of the struggle for territory is as unmistakable in the continuing conflict in Afghanistan, the street fighting of the Arab Spring, and the agonizing border negotiations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it is in the geographical parameters of the European debt crisis and the role of real estate in the U.S. financial crisis. These conflicts between opposing nations, rulers and ruled, creditors and debtors, have been about holding one’s ground in a very literal way, and the differing outcomes in various countries have demonstrated how a virtual reality still awaits a transformation into the physicality of the neighborhood and the street. By the same token, land claims are based on a virtual system of relations imbedded in a particular conception of order. Such a virtual system might be itself a kind of colonizing force, turning the landscapes of the mind into territory to by occupied and defined by a particular system. So the concept of space is both eminently concrete as the struggle over land and exceedingly abstract as the conflict between conceptual systems. In addressing the theme of space, the 2012 Telos Conference in New York invites papers that deal with the variety of ways in which space defines our social, economic, political, and conceptual reality. Topics could include: the virtualization of space by the Internet and social networking, issues of land appropriation and sovereign space, questions about real estate markets and finance, and the imagination of relationality as the metaphysical essence of space.

Please submit conference paper proposals with a 200-word abstract and a short CV by August 31, 2011, to telos@telospress.com. (Mark the subject line “Telos conference proposal.”)