The Art History Graduate Student Association at the University of Arizona is pleased to announce its twenty-third annual symposium,Mapping Discursive Geographies, which will take place February 1, 2013 at the University of Arizona Student Union, Santa Rita Room. Announcement of the keynote speaker is forthcoming.
The goal of this symposium is to explore the relationship between geography and art, art history, and curatorial practices, within the context of recent scholarship on natural and artificial landscapes, landscape aesthetics, earth works, land preservation and degradation, hybridities of art and science, disputed and fraught boundaries, the distribution of resources, and immigration. This symposium hopes to provide a forum to address how geography is a cultural process which can be instrumental in the formation of identity.
Some ideas to consider are: how do national and social identities become inscribed in the terrain? How do visual representations of terrestrial and corporeal spatiality construct meaning? How have shifts in geographies changed the production, exhibition, and/or consumption of artistic, curatorial practices and art historical discourse?
Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
1. Site specificity, locality, and intervention
2. Construction of mythology and symbolism in the landscape
3. National/corporeal identities
4. Physical or intangible borders between nations/individuals and issues of ownership and sovereignty
5. Commercialization, consumerism, and tourism
6. Historic and contemporary cartographic or locational practices
Graduate students in art history and relating disciplines are invited to submit a 300-word abstract and curriculum vita toAHGSA.org@gmail.com by November 20, 2012. Applicants will receive notification via email of the committee’s decisions by December 12, 2012.
To learn more about the Art History Graduate Student Association at the University of Arizona, please visit http://www.cfa.arizona.edu/ahg