POSITIONING GLOBAL SYSTEMS

The 5th Annual Graduate Student Symposium
In conjunction with the Roth-Symonds Lecture

Keynote Speaker:
Professor Saskia Sassen
Columbia University & London School of Economics

Yale School of Architecture
April 15-16, 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS
This symposium, Positioning Global Systems, explores the relationship between networks and locality in the built environment.

New innovations in communication and information technologies form the basis of an expanding virtual geography. Yet the physical manifestations of our interfaces with these systems are often less considered. While contemporary architecture looks towards ways to model the global, our heightened perceptions of geographical specificity instead call for new visions of local articulation. Popular mobile GPS applications, for example, allow us to directly interact with our environments through a play of social, and even cultural, databases.

Through similar narratives of the local, this symposium seeks to reposition our broad and often vague definition of the global.

Participants are invited to submit proposals for papers that investigate a broad range of themes around this topic, including:

Networks and Actors
How does our interaction within globally dispersed networks, such as information, capital, media, and politics, materially structure our local collective and individual identities?

Perception
How is our shared overlap of information, landscape, and technology expressed through evolving understandings of local environments?

Representation
How do representations of our environment, while deployed across larger socioeconomic and cultural systems, give form to our conceptions of territory, statehood, region, and enclave?

Contributions are sought from a wide range of disciplines. Positioning Global Systems aims to bring together efforts from the fields of architecture, art history, sociology, human geography, science, cartography, media studies, political science, and history.

The symposium will open with a keynote address by Professor Saskia Sassen, a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Sassen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities. An eminent scholar in globalization, economics and labor, network technologies, and the nation-state, her books have been translated into a dozen languages. Sassen established the term “global city” in her benchmark text The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 1991), which positioned her at the fore of globalization theory. Her more recent books include Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006), Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects (Routledge 2007), and Digital Formations: IT and New Architects in the Global
  Realm (Princeton University Press 2005).

After the student paper presentations, members of the Yale School of Architecture faculty will provide responses.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Interested graduate students should submit an abstract of no more than 300 words along with a curriculum vitae. Each proposal should clearly articulate the subject matter and its relevancy to the symposium’s theme. All submissions shall be received by Friday, January 8, 2010.

Successful candidates will be notified by the middle of January. Initial drafts of papers for a 20-minute presentation will be due on February 26, 2010. Final drafts will be due by March 29, 2010.

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