5 July 2017


This half-day conference aims to bring together in conversation scholars and artists working across the boundaries of the humanities and the social sciences exploring the cultural aspects of urban life and the importance of culture nowadays in the make-up of so called post-industrial, creative cities. The occasion for the conference is the launch of the book:

Mari Paz Balibrea. The Global Cultural Capital. Addressing the Citizen and Constructing the City in Barcelona. Basingstoke:Palgrave MacMillan, 2017

 

 


PROGRAMME

PANEL 1: 2:15 pm – 3:45 pm

Fernando Sdrigotti (Birkbeck, U of London). The Politics of Space in New Argentine Cinema 

In this paper, I will discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso, one of the most pivotal films of New Argentine Cinema. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis will have as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts

Luis Manuel García (U. of Birmingham). At home, I’m a tourist: Musical migration and affective citizenship in Berlin

This presentation explores the ways in which musical, sonic, and more broadly sensory experiences of Berlin provide the ground for an ambivalent sense of civic belonging for a cadre of migrants affiliated with the city’s local electronic dance music scenes. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork, the accounts of these ‘techno migrants’ articulate an identification with Berlin’s local music scenes as well as with other emotional/felt aspects of the city. These affective identifications provide a means of sustaining a fantasy of belonging to a place where one remains foreign, relying on immersion in and identification with the city’s atmospheres to hold in abeyance the alienating aspects of migration.

PANEL 2: 4pm – 5:45 pm

Xavier Ribas (U. of Brighton). Photography and Urban Peripheries.

This presentation will discuss three photographic series by Ribas focusing on Barcelona’s peripheries.

Marc Morell (U. of Illes Balears). Urban Labour and the Tourist City. Notes from Ciutat de Mallorca

This talk deals with the production of the tourist city by drawing on the presence and activities of different class fractions that inhabit and visit the capital city of Mallorca and its nearby tourist resorts. By establishing the political and economic appropriations that are made of the representations developed upon these fractions, I look into the labour cooperation that makes tourist cities happen to conclude that the economic success of the competitive tourist city needs wide class gaps in between those fractions that work within a same chain of production value.

BOOK LAUNCH  6pm – 7:30 pm

Mari Paz Balibrea. The Global Cultural Capital. Addressing the Citizen and Constructing the City in Barcelona. Palgrave, 2017.

The author will be in conversation with Monica Degen, Brunel U.