CFP: AHRA Research Student Symposium: Research as Open Work

Laura Bowie Announcement
Subject Fields
Architecture and Architectural History, Digital Humanities, Graduate Studies, Urban History / Studies, Urban Design and Planning

The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture is proud to announce it will be hosting the 14th AHRA Annual Research Student Symposium on the theme of 'Research as Open Work' on 6-7 April 2017, at the University of Edinburgh.

The theme of the 14th Annual Research Students’ Symposium: Research as Open Work references Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta. Eco argued that works of art- whether music, painting, or architectural compositions - should be understood as specific “closed” forms that simultaneously offer open and multiple interpretations and performances, constructed by the different perspectives of each listener, viewer, or inhabitant.[1] While research is not synonymous with works of art, it is often constructed as a specifically ‘closed’ form yet is also open to readers, viewers and users. The Symposium theme therefore foregrounds and questions the ‘openness’ of research work and how research that is conceived as ‘open work’ might offer new understandings of conditions or ethics of openness, how contemporary humanities research acts as and contributes to public and responsive (responsible) scholarship.
 
Relatively recent qualifications of humanities research as architectural (driven by specificities of spatial, urban and design for occupation), digital (driven by open source web, democratization of knowledge), environmental (driven by global climate crises/change), medical (driven by health), demonstrate the formations and reformations of fields of studies as specific interdisciplinary congruences. This asserts and opens onto a scope or -scape of particular production and practice such as: architecture, the digital domain, the environment, medicine. Do these qualifications limit, foreground, enhance or blur the productive limits and boundaries of knowledge, the degrees of open and closed relationships between institutions and society, or between disciplines and their research practice conventions?
 
Doctoral researchers at different stages of their careers are invited to respond to the theme and to meet and discuss the emergent approaches to their particular research praxis and current research topics in: architecture, cultural theory, landscape, urbanism and design. We are particularly interested in collaborative and multi-, inter-, trans-, and a- disciplinary practices that are refined through work which operates through conditioned humanities research, and/or crosses between scholarship and policy, academy and practice, and vice versa.

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[1] The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).  See Ewing, S and Periton, D ‘An Open Issue’ in Architecture and Culture Volume 4, Issue 2, (July 2016), pp. 167-171.

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The format of the event will be as follows:

Thursday 6th: REFINING: AHRA conference day of selected papers in chaired sessions with plenary speakers.
Friday 7th: ROUGH AND READY research ‘work in progress’ workshops with invited academics, plenary and keynote speakers.

We are calling for paper proposals and workshop proposals for across this two-day conference that engage with the theme ‘Research as Open Work’ - Please interpret this as you wish.
 
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 8th of January 2017

 
Guide for authors
Papers will be 15 minutes long allowing research students to discuss their research methodologies and issues arising from their work in a collegiate and friendly environment.
To submit your paper extract (no more than 1000 words) for peer review please click on the following link: <EXTRACT SUBMISSION>.

Guide for proposed workshop facilitators and collaborations
Workshops will be programmed in before lunch and after lunch slots so will be around 2 to 3 hours long (this is slightly flexible).
To submit your proposal (no more than 1000 words or equivalent - if multimedia) for peer review please click on the following link: <EXTRACT SUBMISSION>.

ALL EXTRACTS AND EQUIVALENT WILL RECEIVE FEEDBACK AND CONSTRUCTIVE COMMENTS 
Submissions will be reviewed by the organising committee, members of the AHRA steering group and University of Edinburgh Interdisciplinary scholars. Submissions will be selected for inclusion in the symposium on this basis. 

Important Dates
Deadline for submission: 8th January 2017, 5PM
Notification of acceptance: early Feb 2017
Deadline for final amended abstracts for online upload: 3rd March 2017

Contact Information

Laura Bowie (PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies, University of Edinburgh)
 

Contact Email
ahrapostgrad2017@gmail.com