Sunday 22nd March – Tuesday 24th March 2015, Lisbon, Portugal

Call for Presentations

This inter- and multidisciplinary conference focuses on the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic. We welcome proposals by academics, teachers, independent researchers, students, artists, NGOs and anyone interested in manifestations of monstrosity in space. Possible topics may include topics as diverse as ancient burial sites, haunted houses, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and even recent topographical manifestations of the Gaza conflict or the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Even if they no longer bear the physical markers of violence, devastation and human suffering geographical locations are often imbued with memories of horror that are passed on from generation to generation through various textual, audial and visual media.

Apart from historical events of monstrosity the scope of our conference entails imagined monstrosities and future landscapes of annihilation and death. Philosophical discussions are just as much welcome as artistic performances and explorations of literary, filmic or musical case studies of evil and the monstrous. The following questions may trigger ideas for presentations: What is the relationship between evil and the monstrous? Is the monstrous always rooted in the element of evil? Can disasters caused by nature be regarded as evil? Can we talk about geographies of poverty, hunger and homelessness in relation to monstrosity? Can evil and/or monstrosity be immanent to place or are they performed by cultural discourse, rituals and practices of memory? How do the monstrous and the geographic intersect in architecture, the arts, popular culture, politics, and the sciences?

We welcome presentations, papers, reports, performances, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels from all academic disciplines. Presentations may include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Unknown worlds
• Dystopic landscapes
• Sites of heterotopia
• Malevolent regions
• Bodies as maps and maps as bodies
• Places of isolation, incarceration and madness
• Places of rituals and incest
• Sites of experimentation
• Evil planets and dimensions
• Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
• Alien landscapes
• Sites of environmental disasters (both natural and manmade)
• Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
• De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands
• Monstrostiy and liminality
• Religion, ritual and monstrosity
• Haunted sites and spectral spaces
• Graveyards
• Sites of conflict and violence
• Terrain vague, abandoned buildings
• The architecture of death and destruction (sites of torture and extermination)
• Geographical manifestations of the uncanny
• Tourism and monstrous geographies
• Monstrous Dreamscapes
• Mazes
• Monstrous materialities
• Ethics and morality in relation to monstrosity and evil
• Monstrous geographies of the body and the mind

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 31st October 2014. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 23rd January 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: MG4 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

László Munteán: l.muntean@let.ru.nl
Rob Fisher: mg4@inter-disciplinary.net

The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook.  Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.