EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - Everyday life in the global city

Everyday life in the global city – Manchester, 9-11 July 2007

09-07-2007

Introduction

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. It will critically question how the conceptualising of global cities might be challenged by a focus upon everyday urban practices

Description

The conference aims to:

explore tensions between cultural specificities and global processes
investigate the banality of institutionalised elite transnational practices
interrogate existing notions of the ‘everyday’

A call for papers is open to all interested parties. Abstracts should be emailed by 30 April 2007. One of the following conference themes should be addressed in the paper:

Conceptualising 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 conceptualisations 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?

Programme

Location

Manchester, United Kingdom

Links

For more information and to register, please visit the conference website
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