Envisioning Community: Space, Place and Translating the Past in 19th and 20th Century Britain

Envisioning Community is a one-day conference exploring how multidisciplinary approaches to the study of community can better inform our understanding of the historical past.

The conference features renowned keynote speakers in the fields of historical and human geography, as well as in the field of visual media and its interpretation, the conference is open to delegates from all disciplines engaging with the processes of space and place in community in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.

The conference will build on the challenges wrought by the ‘spatial turn’ by interrogating spatially related communities: how the inhabitants of the same streets or towns constructed, responded to and used their physical locations to forge a shared sense of identity, or to bring about social and political change.

Confirmed speakers include Prof. Nigel Thrift (Vice Chancellor, University of Warwick), Dr Lynne Walker (University of London) and Prof. Elizabeth Edwards (University of Arts, London).

Papers are encouraged from researchers working in the following areas:

• Historical ‘walks’ and geographic models in understanding located community.
• The role of visual material in the interpretation and/or creation of communities: painting, photography, film etc…
• The interface between spatiality and human, social and political action.
• Gender and community.
• Economics and community.