United Kingdom

Call for Papers: Materiality and Precarity: Preserving Holocaust Memorial Sites 

We are delighted to announce a upcoming postgraduate conference at the University of Cambridge, in partnership with DAAD Cambridge, for graduate and early career researchers to share emerging research on challenges to preserving Holocaust sites. 

The conference will take place in Cambridge on June 25-26, 2025; paper proposals are due on March 31, 2025.

We welcome proposals on topics included – but not limited to – the following:

• Evolving interpretations of ‘Authenticity’
• Climate Change and Memorial Sites; impact, planning, prevention
• Memorialisation
• Holocaust tourism
• Sources of “wear and tear” to physical objects, buildings, and landscapes at Holocaust sites
• Representing place in cultural and popular media
• The role of ‘virtual space’ and digital media
• Political controversies about management of memorial sites
• Contemporary comparisons between climate change and Nazi genocide 
• Contemporary and historical conflicts over space at sites (national, religious)

Applicants are invited to submit a paper title, short bio (150 words) and abstract (300 words) to Beatrice Leeming (University of Cambridge) rl699@cam.ac.uk and Jonathan Marrow (University of Cambridge) jm2521@cam.ac.uk
Applications close on 31 March, 2025. There will be funding to support travel costs and accommodation.

Contact Information

 Jonathan Marrow (University of Cambridge) jm2521@cam.ac.uk and Beatrice Leeming (University of Cambridge) rl699@cam.ac.uk 

Contact Email

jm2521@cam.ac.uk

Histories of Disabilities and Living Spaces from Ancient to Modern Worlds

Royal Holloway’s Bodies and Material Culture Research Group invites papers for a one-day workshop in Central London on histories of disabilities and living spaces from the ancient to the modern world. The relationship between historical actors with physical and mental disabilities and the places they live is complex, with embodied experiences and the material world offering scope for both agency and frustration. Drawing on the recent expansion in histories of disabilities across ancient, medieval, early modern and modern studies, this workshop applies this new critical approach to the study of past living spaces. The workshop will focus on how people with physical impairments, mental illness, chronic illness, degenerative, and age-related conditions (including any intersection of the above) interacted with historic domestic environments. The workshop will use comparative histories – from the ancient past to the contemporary present – to look at similarities and differences across time and space. We will explore new methodologies for interpreting embodied experiences, drawing on ideas of co-production and participatory research. We aim to further shared understandings of lived experiences, and to explore how these might be represented in public histories and heritage.

Keynote Speakers: Kyle Jordan (Independent Curator and Researcher) and India Whiteley (QMUL)

Papers might address, but are not limited to, the experience of people with disabilities, chronic or mental illness, degenerative, and/or age-related conditions (including any intersection of the above) in relation to the following themes:

• The planning, design, building and adaptation of living spaces
• Embodiment and the interaction of bodies with domestic material culture
• Development of historic assistive technologies and therapies 
• Household structures and hierarchies e.g. Roman households and their extended family members, early modern apprentice households, nuclear families including: development of support networks; exploitation and/or abuse
• Changing patterns of individual, family and collective residence e.g. monasteries or schools
• Identification with domestic space and home as an emotional construct 
• New approaches to interpreting historic embodied experiences e.g. participatory research or co-production 
• Methods and source materials that reveal living spaces including archaeological, textual, legislative, visual and material 
• Strategies for representing historical actors in domestic heritage 

The workshop will take place on Tuesday June 24th 2025 at Senate House, University of London. Please send proposals (300 word abstract and 100 word biography) to Jane Hamlett jane.hamlett@rhul.ac.uk and Hannah Platts Hannah.platts@rhul.ac.uk by March 31st. We welcome proposals from those at all career stages of academia, independent scholars, heritage and museum professionals. Papers can be presented in person or online.

Contact Information

Jane Hamlett

Contact Email

jane.hamlett@rhul.ac.uk

URL

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-education/research/research-enviro…

United Kingdom

Stitched Together: Needlework Making and Research
21st-22nd August 2025
Royal School of Needlework, Hampton Court Palace

CALL FOR PAPERS

Keynote speakers: Dr Lynn Hulse, Raisa Kabir, Rose Sinclair MBE, Hannah Sutherland ACR

The Royal School of Needlework and Pasold Research Fund invite papers for the Royal School of Needlework’s first conference on historical needlework, ‘Stitched Together: Needlework Making and Research’. This conference will imagine needlework in its broadest sense, classified as all art and craft involving a needle, hook, or shuttle. This includes embroidery, plain sewing, lace making, knitting, crocheting, and weaving.

Needlework is universal, made around the world in countless ways for nearly all of human history. Through needles, hooks, and shuttles, we see economic, social, political, religious, and cultural changes. Needlework demonstrates who had access to what materials, how designs and stitches travelled the world via the Silk Road and across oceans, how the rise and fall of empires affected design and resources, how technology influenced changing aesthetics and craft practices, and how people have spent their time in business and leisure. 

Though needlework has long been the subject of academic, socioeconomic, and object-centric study, there have been very few opportunities for those who create needlework and those who research needlework to collaborate and learn from one another. It is the hope that this conference will bridge the gap between visual and historiographical analysis and knowledge of the historical, socioeconomic, and literary contexts of needlework with embodied knowledge of materials, techniques, and artistic choices. 

This conference is a meeting place for anyone working on topics related to historical embroidery to present their work and research. This includes work happening in academia, museums and heritage institutions, art studios, classrooms, and independent research environments. We encourage proposals from established and emerging scholars, makers, curators, conservators, and anyone whose work is relevant to discussions about historical needlework in any capacity.  

We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations. These can take any format, such as academic papers, conversations between makers and researchers, or demonstrations. We are especially interested in presentations that explore the potential of collaboration between those who use historical needlework in different ways. Topics may include but are not limited to: 

• New discoveries in the field of historical needlework 
• The relationship between making and research
• Conservation of historical needlework
• Curating historical needlework
• Marginalised needleworkers (race, gender, class, region, technique) 
• Historic needlework networks, especially global ones 
• Studying historical needlework through making 
• Potential for collaboration between various stakeholders in the world of historical embroidery

Proposal deadline: Monday, 14th April 2025

Please send a paper title, abstract (maximum 250 words), and bio (maximum 50 words) to collection@royal-needlework.org.uk. Decisions will be made by mid-May.

The conference will allow for virtual attendance via Zoom webinar but only in-person presentations will be considered.

Contact Email

collection@royal-needlework.org.uk

URL: https://royal-needlework.org.uk/stitched-together-conference-call-for-papers/

Conference: Out of Scale: From “Miniature” Material Cultures to the Anthropic Principle
London, June 16-18, 2025
 

Conveners: Wenjie Su (Princeton University; CASVA), Yizhou Wang (Hong Kong Baptist University), Stephen Whiteman (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

Dates and Venue: June 16-17, 2025 (conference at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London)
                                June 18, 2025 (optional viewing sessions in or around London)

Keynote speakers: Andrew James Hamilton (The Art Institute of Chicago), Wei-Cheng Lin (The University of Chicago)

Call for Paper: 
Scale—the relative dimension, magnitude, or scope of objects, and their proportional relationship to the observer—is often understood through the lens of individual or collective visual assumptions. As inhabitants of the terrestrial sphere, we tend to rely on our bodies and cultural paradigms to interpret the scale of geographical terrain, human-made structures, material artifacts, social phenomena, and historical events. Technological advancements—from maritime expeditions to space exploration, from telescopic and microscopic investigations to the detection of cosmic microwave background—have urged humanity to redefine its scale of existence. Meanwhile, various philosophical and religious traditions have long pondered humanity’s place and purpose in relation to natural and supernatural realms.

By exploring designs and creations conceived on a micro-scale or as small-sized, this conference invites discussion on human creativity and human existence through the theme of scale. Examples abound across diverse human traditions, including burial and ritual objects, microarchitecture, portrait miniatures, and accessorial items such as netsukes, snuff boxes, and pocket watches. These objects appear diminutive when compared to the human body, the “worlds” they represent, or their counterparts within more dominant socio-cultural systems. At times dismissed as frivolous and superficial, these streamlined and recontextualized objects can evoke out-of-scale resonances, transcending the original limitations of data or resources.

This conference connects studies that examine the art historical, historiographical, and ideological significance of scaled objects. First, we aim to deepen discussions on the sensorial, spiritual, intellectual, and technical implications of scaling. Particularly understudied are ephemeral objects and repositioned sites, such as lab settings and festival stagings. Second, we seek to investigate how the scale—of originals, reproductions, or paradigms—has shaped the central or peripheral status of specific objects and sites in art historical scholarship.

Third, we aim to highlight the unique contributions that humanities and art historical scholars can make in addressing cutting-edge intellectual challenges in fields including AI and space exploration. Throughout the global history of visual and material cultures, creatively re-scaled objects have played a central role in conceiving and simulating worlds that surpass our optical and epistemological thresholds. By exploring how humans have continually shifted scales to position themselves within and across realms, this conference reflects on humanity’s inherently limited yet endlessly creative perspective and envisions pathways to launch beyond boundaries.  

Further questions and topics include but are not limited to: 
– Material, aesthetic, sensory and affective qualities unique to small-scale objects.
– Practices of modeling and scaling in the production of scientific knowledge, such as mapping and laboratory experiments.
– The dialectics of miniature and monumentality.
– Relationships between scale, virtuality, and reality.
– Critical reflections on the interpretational framework of “miniaturization”, such as the so-called miniature paintings of various Asian and Islamic traditions.
– Challenges posed by small-scale objects or fragments in archaeological, museum, and pedagogical contexts.
– The role of scale-shifting in methodological turns, such as global history, gender criticism, and eco-criticism.

We invite proposals from scholars in a range of disciplines, including art and architecture history, museum studies, cultural history, intellectual history, and the history of science, and on any geographic region and any period of time.

Please send an abstract (ca. 250 words) for a 20-min presentation and a 150-word bio as a single PDF file by March 15, 2025 to conference convenors: w-su@nga.gov ; yizhouwang@hkbu.edu.hk ; stephen.whiteman@courtauld.ac.uk 

Acceptance notification: March 30, 2025

Event details:
The symposium will be held June 16-17, 2025 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Optional group viewing sessions will be arranged on June 18. Accepted speakers will be invited to propose objects from London-based collections or sites that resonate with the themes of scale and the miniature.

Contact Email

yizhouwang@hkbu.edu.hk

The Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers conference will be held in Birmingham, UK, from August 27-29, 2025 on the theme of Creative Geographies/Geographies of Creativity. 

For those working on social and cultural geography with an interest in aging, intergenerational learning, and place, please consider submitting a proposal to this online session – accepted papers will be notified by February 28, and the session will be submitted to the RGS-IBG team for consideration by March 7.

Aging and the ‘crafts of place’: creative engagements in practice and method 

In a 1981 lecture, Clifford Geertz used the term “crafts of place” to describe practices and systems that “work by the light of local knowledge” (1981, 167). This evocative terminology highlights the relationship between knowing, doing, and place – a nexus for interdisciplinary consideration of land-based knowledge, place-making, and place-based cultural production. Indigenous ways of knowing have long emphasized the role of land as pedagogy (Betasamosake Simpson 2014), while attention to sustainability has given new impetus to studies of place-based and vernacular skills, products, and practices (Paneels 2023; Watson 2019). Placemaking, too, might be conceptualized as a ‘craft of place,’ with recent scholarship beginning to outline the role of creativity in placemaking (Courage and McKeown 2019; Courage 2020) and underscoring the relationship between regional ecologies, cultural landscapes and cultural heritage practices (Gillett 2022; Luckman and Thomas 2024). Given that these frameworks highlight the importance of spending time with a place and the validity of embodied and relational ways of learning and knowing, how do they intersect with the real or imagined effects of time on human bodies and communities – with aging? How does engagement with the ‘crafts of place’ evolve throughout the life course? What is the role of intergenerational relationships in sustaining local knowledge and place-based practices? Might the elements of time and aging challenge or broaden the notions of local knowledge or crafts of place? Might thinking of aging in relation to these themes provide a lens through which to consider it as a socially, culturally and spatially-delineated process? How might research itself become a ‘craft of place’ that engages creatively with practices, places and (aging) demographics whose ways of knowing have been historically marginalized by institutions?

This single-session online panel invites speakers to submit abstracts for 10-15 minute presentations that engage with themes of aging and ‘the crafts of place,’ broadly interpreted, with particular consideration given to those that use case studies to highlight creative and innovative practices and methods. Speakers are invited to share ideas for how best to facilitate conversation around their presentation topics and will be able to upload additional material as well as questions for the audience ahead of the session. It is anticipated that the session will include an opportunity for discussion in themed breakout rooms. 

Research Group Sponsorship: Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Sponsorship application submitted, not yet confirmed

Convenor and Affiliation: Dr. Molly-Claire Gillett, Postdoctoral Fellow, Trent Centre for Aging and Society, Trent University (Canada) & School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies, University of Galway (Ireland)

Guidelines for prospective authors: please upload an abstract of ~250 words along with a short bio of ~50 words to this form: https://forms.office.com/r/iiNZwUcdaW by February 21, 2025.

Questions can be directed to Molly-Claire Gillett (mollyclairegillett@trentu.ca) Selected authors will be notified by February 28, with the complete panel proposal sent to RGS for consideration by March 7.

References:

Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. 2014. “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious     transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 no. 3: 1-25.            https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22170/17985 

Courage, Cara. 2020. The art of placemaking: a typology of art practices in placemaking. London:     Routledge.

Courage, Cara and Anita McKeown. 2019. Creative Placemaking: Research, Theory, and Practice. London:  Routledge.

Cutchin, Malcolm and Graham D. Rowles, eds. 2024. Handbook on Aging and Place. Cheltenham and   Northampton: Edgar. 

Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology. E-book. New York:   Basic Books.

Gillett, Molly-Claire. 2022. “‘Storying’ Landscape and Material Practice: Clones Crochet Lacemaking            as Irish Intangible Cultural Heritage.” New Hibernia Review 26, no. 4: 36-   64. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2022.0045.

Luckman, Susan and Nicola Thomas. 2024. Craft Communities. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Panneels, Inge. 2023. “The Quintuple Bottom Line: A Framework for Place-Based Sustainable          Enterprise in the Craft Industry.” Sustainability 15, no. 4: 3791.     https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043791

Skinner, Mark, Rachel Winterton and Keiran Walsh eds. 2021. Rural Gerontology: Towards Critical       Perspectives on Rural Ageing. London and New York: Routledge.

Watson, Julia. 2019. Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism. London: Taschen.

Contact Information

Molly-Claire Gillett
Postdoctoral Fellow, Trent University and University of Galway

Contact Email

mollyclairegillett@trentu.ca

The Archives Association of Ontario is pleased to announce the 2025 Annual Conference to be held from May 6th to May 8th virtually.

Theme: Ebb and Flow: Narratives of Adaptability

This theme focuses on how archives, archivists, and information professionals adapt to challenges, recover from disruptions, and transform their practices to remain vital and responsive to their communities. Whether facing environmental change, evolving technologies, or funding constraints, “Ebb and Flow” explores how the path towards innovation and growth is rarely straightforward.

Stay tuned for more information!  #aao25conf

• Call for Papers (PDF) 
• Call for Student Posters and Papers (PDF) 
  
  *DEADLINE FOR CALLS EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 14, 2025*

Sounds of a Lifetime: Exploring Life Writing in Audio Media (29–30 January 2026, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 

This conference aims to expand the boundaries of life writing studies by focusing on the often-overlooked domain of audio life narratives. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson highlight in the preface of Reading Autobiography, “[l]ife narrative studies has become an expansive, transnational, multimedia field” (xi), going far beyond the written word. In the latest edition of this seminal work, they touch upon the concept of mediated voice and the aural qualities of social media messages, indicating the varied manifestations of auto/biographical acts (129).  

Building on the exciting new work being done in studies of life writing, auto/biography, literary studies, sound studies, and media studies, this conference seeks to explore the multifaceted realm of sonic life narratives, with a particular emphasis on their literary and artistic features, as well as listeners’ individual and collective experiences. More specifically, it seeks to examine how audio life writing represents, mediates, and (re)constitutes lives; what aesthetic strategies are used and what effects they generate; how audio life narratives are received and remediated; as well as their inherent politics. 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:  

• Theoretical/methodological reflections on audio life writing  
• Audio life writing in specific genres and media (radio drama, podcasts, rap and spoken word poetry, …) 
• Voice, sound and music in audio life writing  
• Audio life writing and cultural memory 
• Audio life writing and identity (individual and collective) 
• Audio life writing and politics 
• Audio life writing and intermediality 
• Adaptations of life stories to audio media 
• Audio archives and life narratives  
• Fact and fiction in audio life writing  
• Listening to audio life writing  
• … 

The conference will be held in English, but research on non-Anglophone contexts is strongly encouraged. Please note that we are aiming for an in-person conference.  

The following keynote speakers have confirmed: Julia Lajta-Novak (University of Vienna), Jarmila Mildorf (University of Paderborn), Matthew Rubery (Queen Mary University of London) 

Please submit your abstract (250–300 words) as a PDF or Word document, including your name, affiliation, and contact details, along with a brief biography (100 words) via email to soundsofalifetime@vub.be by February 15, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by March 20, 2025. Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of an international peer- reviewed journal or an edited volume.  

Please follow updates on our conference website: https://events.vub.be/sounds-of-a-lifetime-exploring-life-writing-in-audio-media