Airport Culture(s) is a conference where we take issue with prevailing and problematic perceptions about the meanings of airports in contemporary cultural studies across a range of language traditions. Mark Augé, in his 1992 study Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité famously defines airports as ‘non-places’, as ‘a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical or concerned with identity’. Yet, we suggest that far from being a non-place, the airport is, in fact, a rich source of indexicality. Can the airport - with its security screens, border controls and visa regulations - ever be devoid of hegemonic interest and the protocols of 'identity'? This question seems particularly pertinent in the postcolonial, globalised, post-9/11 world we now inhabit. Given the focus on vulnerability with its concomitant need for patrol and security, we seek interventions which help us to rethink this crucial transport hub: a place where transversal motion meets the vertices of ‘border force’ and uniquely ‘placed’ in the global present, as a particular manifestation of modern human encounter in which a range of selfhoods are certified, legitimated, arrested, endangered or expelled.
‘Airport Culture(s)’ is a two-day conference to be held at the Institute for Modern Language Research (IMLR) in London on 28-29 April 2016. It explores the politics and power relations of the airport questioning how we read and write about airports. How can we theorise the agency and significance of the airport? What is the potential of airport space to function as a dissident, critical or postcolonial place? In what ways do airports function or fail as transcultural border and/or contact zones? We are delighted to welcome as a keynote, Will Self, critically acclaimed writer and journalist, who has agreed to present his latest project in a talk and reading entitled ‘Walking to Airports: Evolutionary Psychology and the Globalised Umwelt’.
We invite papers and presentations from a variety of disciplinary and comparative perspectives in relation to three thematic axes: ‘Encounters’, ‘Mobilities’, and ‘Economies’. The following is an indicative, but by no means exhaustive, selection of the kinds of issues we hope to address:
Encounters
- Space and place of the airport
- Power relations (citizenship, legislation, policing, etc.)
- Borders, frontiers, and stateless zones
- Postcolonial and colonial airports
- Airports and the environment
- Airports and national identities/stereotypes
- Refugees and asylum seekers
- Race, ethnicity and gender
- Architecture of airports
- Airports and their relation to the city
Mobilites
- Infrastructures
- Travellers’ trajectories
- Location and migration
- Movement(s) within the airport and beyond
- Security (i.e. pre- and post-9/11, racial profiling)
- Airports in war/destruction of airports
- Airports and health (Ebola screening, swine flu scares, etc.)
- Airports in travel writing
Economics
- Class and access, budget- and business-class
- Travellers and airport workers
- Airports and capitalism/neo-liberalism/consumerism
- Private jets, private travels
- Privatisation of security
- Globalisation and movement of goods
- Airports and advertising
Please send proposals for panels or individual papers of no more than 350 words detailing your topic, along with a brief bio of no more than 60 words, to airportcultures2016@gmail.com by 19 October 2015.