Call for Papers: 'Everyday Life in the Global City'

Everyday Life in the Global City

The Institute for Culture, Gender and the City (ICGC) at Manchester Metropolitan University is organizing a conference for July 9th -11th 2007.

Everyday life has often been neglected in studies of globalisation across the social sciences and humanities. Yet focus on the everyday is useful in both challenging and grounding theories about the global city. Because of its often unreflexive, habitual nature, everyday experience and practice is apt to be overlooked by rather over-general theories about the global. This conference seeks to reinstall the everyday as a focus for enquiry. We aim to explore tensions between cultural specificities and global processes, investigate the banality of institutionalized elite transnational practices, and interrogate existing notions of the ‘everyday'. We also aim to critically question how the conceptualizing of global cities might be challenged by a focus upon everyday urban practices.

Themes based on aspects of everyday life in non-Western cities are especially welcome. Suggestions for papers should address the following:

• Conceptualizing the everyday in a global context: How are global flows (of things, images, people, money) incorporated into everyday urban practices? Alternatively, how might unreflexive, everyday practices provide a grounded sense of place and maintain local cultural identity?

• Cosmopolitanism: How might the notion of everyday cosmopolitanism challenge contemporary conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism?

• Transnational elite practices: How do the everyday practices of business, intellectual and cultural elites (re)produce urban governance and economy? How are these contested?

• Popular urban culture: How do transnational music, sport, fashion and dining practices, as well as other forms of popular consumption, provide everyday milieus for performing urban life?

• Glocal hybridity: How can the city be conceived as a site in which everyday ‘glocal' and ‘hybrid' forms of identity and culture are continually (re)produced?

• Multicultural relations, diversity and conflict: How do different migrant, ethnic and religious groups discover, (re)invent and (re)produce forms of everyday urban life?

Keynote speakers

The organizers are keen to ensure that leading scholars in the fields of everyday global life, urban and cultural studies and cosmopolitanism will contribute to plenary sessions at the conference. David Bell and Beverly Skeggs have already agreed to be keynote speakers but negotiations with several other leading thinkers in this area are also proceeding. We will update the ICGC website as further information comes in on this and other matters.

Postgraduates contributors

We very much welcome the participation of postgraduates whether as contributors to the debates and/or as individuals offering papers based on their current doctoral or other research. With this in mind we are offering special low-cost deals to postgraduates with several built-in options (see below).

Additional information

The ICGC was established in 2003. All its members are keenly research active and involved in a number of diverse projects. It is made up of four research groups with overlapping research interests: The Cities Spaces and Power Group; The Gender and Sexuality Research Centre; The Institute for Global Studies; and the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture. The ICGC's members will play a leading role in arranging and managing theme-based workshops.

All papers arriving in time will be collated and presented in a conference booklet. The organizers enjoy a range of close contacts with a number of key publishers and are confident that book contracts will be negotiated based on selective conference papers.

Abstracts should be emailed by April 30th 2007 at the latest to one of the people identified below. The organizers will regularly deal with incoming abstracts in batches and inform participants of our decision. You should also return you booking form to one of the organizers listed below who can also be contacted for further enquiries:

Chris Porter, Paul Kennedy and Tim Edensor.

Conference costs and booking

The conference costs £150 for full time academics and £50 for postgraduates (or £75 if the latter wish to participate in the conference dinner). This will include two lunches, all teas/coffees, the conference meal at a top city restaurant, a bound copy of the conference abstracts and the conference fees. A second evening meal will be arranged later and will be paid for separately.

Accommodation is available in one of the universities new student halls at a cost of approximately £24.15 per night including vat. Breakfast is £6.80. We can book this for you if you tell us which nights you want (see booking form). If you want the campus accommodation you will need to calculate the amount for this and add it to your overall total when you make your credit card payment. If you wish to stay in one of the local hotels you need to make you own arrangements for booking and paying. There are a number of hotels in the city centre – your choice depending on what you are prepared to pay. You could also try some of the standard chain hotels around Portland Street , which is a brisk 10-15 minute walk to MMU. These are cheaper than the city centre hotels – probably around £50 a night?

Try: Premier Travel Inn

or: Britannia Manchester Hotel

or: Hotel Ibis

All these are very central.

You could also try this website - http://www.virtualmanchester.co.uk/accommodation/
or search the internet for cheaper deals, such as www.expedia.com.

If you do not inform us of your wish to book campus rooms we will assume you are making your own separate hotel arrangements.

You can pay the conference fees directly in advance by using the university's credit card system. This will automatically go into the conference budget.

Please refer to the web site for ICGC for (a) continuing conference updates and (b) to access the conference booking form and payment details. Access MMU's web site (www.mmu.ac.uk) then click on the ‘Research' menu on the left hand side and from there go to the Institute of Culture, Gender and the City. Click on ‘News and Events'.