[P2P-F] Fwd: [members] Fwd: Transvaluation_Symposium_Reminder of Call for abstracts

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Adam Arvidsson <adam.arvidsson at unimi.it>
Date: Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 6:28 PM
Subject: [members] Fwd: Transvaluation_Symposium_Reminder of Call for
abstracts
To: P2PValue Project Members List <members at lists.p2pvalue.eu>


FYI
Adam Arvidsson
Associate Professor
Department of Social and Political Sciences
University of Milano
via Conservatorio 7, 20122 Milano
+39-0250321209
adam.arvidsson at unimi.it



Begin forwarded message:

*From: *Noortje Marres <n.marres at gold.ac.uk>
*To: *csisp-l <csisp-l at gold.ac.uk>
*Subject: **Fwd: Transvaluation_Symposium_Reminder of Call for abstracts*
*Date: *3 Dec 2014 22:16:01 CET

   Dear colleagues,

We invite you to contribute with abstracts for the symposium *Transvaluation:
Making the world matter.* Please, also help us spread this information.

With excuse for cross-mailing, kind regards,

conference organisers

Call for abstracts – Brief

In the current measurement- and indicator-driven knowledge culture,
research in architecture, art and several disciplines within humanities and
social sciences may succumb to economic or scientific models, or be
separated from important contexts of invention, risking to reduce research
largely to standardized reproduction. Responding to the current
proliferation of evaluation systems and the dominant culture of measurement
that comes with it, the Transvaluation international symposium, May 21-22
2015, searches for alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of
creation and invention, of ‘making and thinking’, and ways to trans- and
re-value research cultures from within.



The ambition is a high quality event with top level keynote speeches, small
format seminars and collective forum discussions, with the intent to start
a broad debate addressing fundamental strategic research questions across
disciplinary borders, and to instigate possibilities for change.



Key note speakers are international experts in social, global
anthropology, *Arjun
Appadurai*; art researching practice and doctoral education, *Andrea
Phillips;* and speculative realism and material objects, *Graham Harman*.



The symposium will focus two major themes,* Poetics *and *Politics of Value*,
referring to the (re-)making of values, both in artistic and architectural
practice and in human scientific research, and their related political and
systemic aspects. These themes are examined through two conceptual lenses:
*Worlding* (shaping the world, transforming matter) and *U-topos *(space
for speculative thinking and making).



We search for ways in which architecture, art, philosophy, anthropology and
other areas of research may challenge, together, the very concept and
formation of knowledge, stretching and enriching it, hence “transvaluing”
material and spiritual research cultures from within, disclosing
alternative approaches and strengthening their logics of argumentation
within the interdisciplinary frame, with potential to change its systemic
conventions.



We now invite researchers, doctoral students and practitioners to submit
abstracts for discussion at the symposium. Abstracts will be peer reviewed
and, if selected, developed into short papers.



*Keywords*: transvaluation - poetics of value - worlding - architecture -
artistic research



*Deadline for abstracts: December 19, 2014. *For more information on the
call and the selection process, please see end of this document or
conference website, www.chalmers.se/transvaluation .





Key note speakers

Key note speakers (confirmed), actively taking part in the entire event:



*Arjun Appadurai* – world famous social-cultural anthropologist, discussing
cultural activity as the social imaginary forming modernity and global
cultural flows into dimensions of e.g. ethno-scapes and mediascapes. From a
critical perspective on the global academic system, Appadurai has created
the New School University, New York, and is founder of the academic journal
Public Culture.

*Andrea Phillips* – renowned designer, curator and Director of the Doctoral
Research Programmes in Fine Art and Curating at Goldsmiths College, London
University. Phillips also directs several international interdisciplinary
research projects and publishes widely on art, curating, politics and
public space.

*Graham Harman* – contemporary philosopher of metaphysics and professor at
the American University in Cairo, Egypt. With outset in speculative realism
and his concept of ‘object oriented philosophy’, Harman investigates
alternatives to the linguistic turn in Western philosophy, hereby evoking
extensive debate on our hermeneutic relation to the (technological) world
of objects.





Description of the symposium themes

Transvaluation: Making the World Matter

in search for alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of
creation and invention,  of ‘making and thinking’



*Challenges and themes*
Academic research and education are currently dominated by a
measurement-culture and the proliferation of evaluation systems that comes
with it. In response to this, the symposium aims to outline the
possibilities for *alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of
creation and invention, of ‘making and thinking’*. Its first and most
important concern is to start a broad debate on the following subjects: (1)
the consequences of the (monopolization of) efficiency-standards in the
spheres of science and creativity – a tendency reinforced by the Bologna
educational system – and (2) the search for viable alternatives.


Efficiency-driven systems of evaluation are less innocent as one may think.
They often hide an 'intellectual conformity', having nothing to do anymore
with 'the animating spirit of discovery' and tending towards 'the
mono-culture of a discipline grown too large and the accompanying failure
of imagination', in one word: to the* 'Big Creativity Deficit'* (Murphy
2013). The rapidly risen and universalized practices of
evaluation-controlled knowledge-production are thought to have led, during
'the past forty years [, to] a significant decline [of creativity] in the
arts and sciences' (Murphy 2013).


”The exhaustion of creative science and arts” seems to have a hard social
and political counterpart in different forms of exclusion, typical of this
'age of  globalization': knowledge-systems are increasingly, and
anonymously, controlling us from above, whereas we actually need a
'globalization from below', where imagination – no longer being 'a matter
of individual genius, an escapism from ordinary life or just a dimension of
aesthetics' – rather becomes a manifold 'faculty through which collective
patterns of dissent and *new design for collective life *emerges'
(Appadurai 2000).


Being part of a larger, already functioning project, this symposium seeks
to initiate the debate, starting from the primarily architectural and
artistic experience of working with concrete 'matter' and being, as a
consequence, entirely involved in 'processes of making'. However, we
believe that these very processes of making and transforming matter are
also crucial to the so-called hard sciences, and to the human and social
sciences. That is why we would like to invite representatives of all of
them to participate in this debate.


*Poetics of Value.* Using the – historical – familiarity with making and
transforming matter of certain disciplines, we introduce the concept
of a *Poetics
of Value*. 'Poetics' itself refers to the ancient Greek practice of
*poièsis* (producing, making, creating, composing), whereas the focus on
'values' stands for the desired reversal of systemic evaluation-practices
in Academia. Thereby, Poetics of Value isn’t merely describing the relation
between an *individual* (artist, designer, philosopher, scientist) and the
matter she or he is transforming; it also takes into account the inventive
*collective* effort communities all over the world will have to be engaged
in as a 're-' and 'transvaluing' response to the challenging problems of
our rapidly globalizing societies and economies.


*Politics of Value*. That is why we simultaneously call for a *Politics of
Value *(following Appadurai, 1988), which is concerned with surpassing the
possibly atomic relation between researchers and their objects, towards
more complex meanings and frameworks of human transactions, attributions
and motivations (Appadurai 1988, 1996). 'Practicing value' has an obvious
ethical dimension we want to explore in these * 'Politics*'. The search for
renewal, for originality and for the production of meaning, relates to the
quest for the unexpected in making or transforming matter. This is
essentially a culture-shaping activity which never aspires to reach stable
knowledge or a fixed state, but strives for continuous evolving
perfectibility. Hence, the creative processes involved lie beyond sheer
knowledge-accumulation, since new or unforeseen artistic forms and designs
do not necessarily increase or diminish knowledge, nor do they primarily
seek to do so.


*Worlding*. Both the Poetics and Politics of Value are perspectives
directed towards an intensive rethinking and redesigning of human relations
with the world. In order to get a better view on both perspectives we
propose two specific 'lenses': *Worlding* and *U-topos*. They represent a
particular kind of practicing values that enables the enrichment and
stretching of the concept of knowledge and the academic culture it creates.
The idea of 'Worlding' refers to the fundamental task of research to 'think
and, somehow, start living new worldly shapes' (Spivak, Nancy, White,
e.a.). Using the lens of 'Worlding' we seek to conceptualize future
alternative knowledge-creating practices and future alternative values,
instead of merely evaluating existing knowledge procedures. This
illuminates the very meaning of the Poetics and Politics of Value: to look
ahead, to discover what remains hidden, to elaborate the speculative
dimension of matter and material manipulation, engaging reality through the
material (Harman).


*U-Topos*. The concept of 'U-topos' on the other hand is introduced as a
place for utopian, speculative thinking. In contrast to preset images of
'Utopia', the U-topos encourages scholars and artists to think the not-yet
visible and the not-yet valuable, a thinking/making propelled by individual
and shared, collective curiosities, towards the formulation of future
values and learning needs, allowing different topics, concepts, themes,
perspectives to collide and combine. U-topos is meant to be an exercise in
transforming both the 'spiritual' and 'material' working places of the
future researcher – it represents university itself. The meaning, relevance
and applicability of these concepts will be the object of debates during
the symposium, from both angles: 'matter' (making, transforming, creating,
designing) and 'thought' (critique, quest for alternatives, attempt to
think the not-yet-available).


The overall project is called *'Transvaluation'*, designed to be an
organized and, hopefully, energizing attempt to overcome the possibility of
a scientific mono-culture that is actually threatening to sacrifice the
whole of academic inventiveness to systems of calculable, quantitative
measurement (creativity-deficit) and which is particularly harmful to many
traditional creative disciplines, such as architecture, fine arts,
philosophy, literature… The proposed debates are designed to be clear-cut:
Can alternatives be conceptualized? Can they prove to be fruitful? If so,
how should they be structured? Can architecture and fine arts,
specifically, contribute to this effort? And how? Can the science – both
the hard sciences and the human and social sciences make their
contribution? And how? Can all these sciences and disciplines be convinced
to join forces on this? Can university be effectively transformed in this
sense?


*Sources:*
Biggs, Michael, and Henrik Karlsson, eds. 2010. *The Routledge Companion to
Research in the Arts*. London: Routledge.
Dunin-Woyseth, Halina. 2006. “The ‘Thinkable’ and ‘Unthinkable’ Doctorates.
Three Perspectives on Doctoral Scholarship in Architecture.” In *Building a
Doctoral Programme in Architecture and Design*, edited by Jan Michl, and
Liv Merete Nielsen, 149-174. Oslo: Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Murphy, Peter (2013). *Inaugural Lecture *at James Cooke University,
Australia, School of Creative Arts (Wednesday 25 September 2013).
Schiesser, Giaco. 2013. *“A Certain Frustration…”. Paradoxes, Voids,
Perspectives in Artistic Research Today. In Practices of Experimentation*,
edited by The Department of Art & Media, Zurich University of the Arts,
97-110. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996, 2005). *Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; (2000), *Grassroots
Globalization and the Research Imagination*. In *Public Culture*, vol. 12,
#1, pp. 1-19.
Harman, Graham, ed., 2011. *The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism
and Realism*. Melbourne: re.press.





Symposium format

The symposium aims to be a ‘call for debate’, therefore the emphasis is on
conversation and discussion rather than paper presentations. Participants
will be invited to cooperate in exercises of speculative thinking, aiming
at creating new places and new spaces for future fundamental research. The
ambition is to form this as a 'high quality conversation' centered on
*statement-lectures
*delivered by top level keynote speakers, *small salons *where participants
discuss each other’s papers (the grouping will be done beforehand and
members of a group receive each other’s papers for reading and commenting),
and *forum debates *on the key themes.



The statement-lectures (providing the input for debate and topics for the
conversation) and the forum debates are plenary. The Salon is organised in
small groups of maximum 5x5 participants, with discussions moderated by
members of the planning and review committee. The keynote speakers have
already expressed their concerned interest for the themes and confirmed to
take active part in the activities of the entire event.



*Preliminary schedule, May 21-22, 2015:*


*May 21:*
09.30 Coffee + registration
10.00 Intro
10.15 statement lecture 1
11.00 Salon 1 (maximum four groups of 25)
12.30 Lunch + walk
14.00 Salon 2 (groups of 25, A-D)
16.00 Coffee
16.30 Forum debate 1
18.15 Statement lecture 2
19.00 Mingle + dinner


*May 22:*
09.00 Statement lecture 3
10.00 Coffee
10.30 Salon 3 (reshuffled groups)
13.00 Lunch + walk
14.00 Critical connections of discussions + wallpapers (to feed into Forum
debate 3)
15.30 Forum debate 3
17.00 Summing up
17.30 End of symposium





Submission process

Please submit abstracts of maximum 500 words (references may be added)
before 19th of December to transvaluation.arch at chalmers.se. If accepted for
the symposium, a short paper (maximum 7 pages including images) shall be
delivered to the same email address by the latest on 20 April 2015.



December 19   Deadline for abstracts

January 26        Notification on abstracts

April 20              Deadline for full papers

April 24              Groups formed, papers distributed, and participants
notified

May 21-22         Symposium



*Review group: *

Nel Janssens, KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas
Brussels & Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Architecture.



Peter De Graeve, Faculty of Fine Arts University of Leuven & Chalmers
University of Technology, Department of Architecture



Catharina Dyrssen, Chalmers University of Technology, Department of
Architecture



Mattias Kärrholm, University of Lund, Department of Architecture and Built
Environment.



Hélène Frichot, KTH, School of Architecture, Division of Critical Studies,
Stockholm



Rolf Hughes, Stockholm University of the Arts



Andrej Slavik, University of Gothenburg, Department of Literature, History
of Ideas, and Religion & Chalmers University of Technology, Department of
Architecture.



*Core planning group*: Nel Janssens, Peter De Graeve, Catharina Dyrssen



*Planning assistance*: Julia Fredriksson (symposium contents), Nidal Yousif
(facilities)



*For more information *on research contents etc., please use the symposium
mail address, transvaluation.arch at chalmers.se. Questions can also be mailed
directly to Julia Fredriksson, julia.fredriksson at chalmers.se, or Catharina
Dyrssen, dyrssen at chalmers.se. For practicalities, travel and accommodation,
please contact Nidal Yousif, nidal.yousif at chalmers.se. Also see symposium
website: www.chalmers.se/transvaluation.







*Vänliga hälsnigar | Kind regards*


*Lotta Särnbratt *Informatör | Communications
Officer
Institutionen för arkitektur | Department of Architecture

+46 31 772 2445

+46 76 125 7039 (mobile)

lotta.sarnbratt at chalmers.se



*[image: cid:image001.jpg at 01CC2F3C.8093B9D0]*

Chalmers tekniska högskola | Chalmers University of Technology

Institutionen för arkitektur | Department of Architecture

412 96 Göteborg | 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden

www.chalmers.se





 --
  Professor Andrea Phillips
Director of Research Programmes
Department of Art
Goldsmiths
London SE14 6NW
andrea.phillips at gold.ac.uk

http://art.gold.ac.uk/research/

http://art.gold.ac.uk/tagore/




Dr Noortje Marres
     Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths
University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
  tel.  +44 20 79197571

 Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP)
<http://www.gold.ac.uk/csisp>
 Director

 MA/MSc Digital Sociology
<http://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-msc-digital-sociology/>
Convenor

           *Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and
Everyday Publics* <http://tinyurl.com/c7qfvo6>
 is available from Palgrave

 50% discount via www.palgrave.com quoting WMPTEEP2013a





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