2025 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Submission Details
We especially encourage emerging scholars, practitioners, and artists in the urban humanities to apply and attend. This includes pre-tenured faculty, doctoral students, post-docs, lecturers, graduate students, and early career professionals from a range of academic settings (community colleges, professional schools, small liberal arts colleges, and R1 universities) as well as non-academic institutions (galleries, museums, architectural firms, design practices, city planning offices, NGOs). We welcome artists, organizers, and community practitioners who have a vested interest in urban humanities.We are also especially interested in submissions of team LOIs that reflect interdisciplinary, cross-campus, or campus-community collaborations._
Proposals are due by January 31, 2025. To be considered for participation upload a one-two page PDF that describes the following:
Please include: Full name, contact email, and your current organization/institution as well as your current role/title.
Your interest in the conference and how you view yourself as a scholar and/or practitioner and/or artist of urban humanities.
A response or critical idea about what is missing and/or what new directions need to be taken within the field of urban humanities and/or within how we conventionally understand cities and urban spaces.
A project that you would bring, present, and workshop for feedback with other urban humanists. Projects could take the following forms: research article, design as research, conceptual designs and proposals, creative media, applied and/or community-engaged projects, curricula/syllabi, or “other.” Images may be included in one additional page in the submitted PDF or made available via a website link shared in the proposal.
A preferred format for how you would like to participate in the conference and be listed in the program. We are aware of different institutional requirements to receive travel funds/permissions, as well as varying norms for presenting work beyond academia, and want your participation to be documented as best fits your needs. Suggested formats are as follows.
Suggested participation formats:
Site-specific or experiential sessions and installations: Participants lead or collaborate on field work, place-based activities, methodology workshops off-site or exhibition displays or installations (gallery space is available—specifications will be shared with accepted participants).
Workshop: Conversations on pre-circulated work: Up to three participants delivering five-minute opening remarks and receiving feedback through a moderated discussion. Panelists will pre-circulate materials (papers, syllabi, design research, works-in-progress) to conference attendees to facilitate the exchange. 75 minutes.
Mini-Workshop: presenters lead an interactive session on-site through which attendees learn about a new process, methodology, or approach. 45 minutes.
Public roundtable discussions: Up to four participants exploring a topic through open-ended and self-directed inquiry, preceded by short 2-3 minute introductions by roundtable members framing their background and interest in the topic. Conference conveners will place panelists into roundtable groups. In your LOI, please indicate keywords and topics for placement purposes. 45 minutes.
Lightning talks: Participants prepare short conversational or multi-media talks for spirited discussion. This format works well for emerging work-in-progress scholarship, non-traditional projects, or as an opportunity to pitch ideas and solicit partners for future projects and initiatives. Presentations are limited to 5 minutes.
Poster Session: Presenters will share original research, emerging scholarship, evidence-informed practices. Participants can prepare a poster (or other visual media) that can be displayed throughout the (Un)Conference. During the poster reception, conference participants are invited to interact with all presenters.
Other: We welcome suggestions to present work in other formats (for example, performance-based presentations). Let us know if you have preferred or alternative presentation formats, and/or if you would like to be involved in organizing or facilitating a session.
CONFERENCE BACKGROUND
Building on the success of the inaugural (Un)Conference 1 in Tucson, AZ, in March 2023, the Urban Humanities Network (UHN) warmly invites Letters of Interest (LOI) for participation in (Un)Conference 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.In the spirit of the Urban Humanities, we are issuing an open call for LOIs to participate in our upcoming convening. We invite submissions showcasing work at the intersections, edges, and territories of design, urban studies, and the humanities.At this critical juncture of the urban humanities, we ask: what are the key and emerging practices driving the urban humanities today? How are the entanglements of disciplines, landscapes, histories, movements, narratives—and more—bringing to light overlooked, underwritten, or previously unknown histories concerning urban places? What still needs to be filled, addressed, and imagined? Each of our respective relationships and varying approaches to urban humanities practice, situated in our embodied and site-specific knowledge, will inform our collective response to these questions.
PROGRAMMING OVERVIEW
From October 16-18, 2025, we will continue navigating toward the practice and future of urban humanities in St. Louis at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). WashU is proud to host (Un)Conference 2 and is excited to share the areas in which they have cultivated focused efforts toward urban and public humanities scholarship and practice.Programming will include opportunities for participants to share their emerging or completed work through a variety of sessions including engaged workshops, mini-workshops, lightning talks, and/or a set of place-based experiences to foster deeper exchange. It is our aim that all attendees will actively contribute to the programming.In particular, St. Louis, with its critical geographical setting at the confluence of two culturally rich watersheds and its multifaceted and complex history of racial, cultural, and economic intersections as well as creative spatial practices, will guide our attention.We will visit multiple neighborhoods in the St. Louis region as a through-line of place-based engagement making connections to adjacent St. Louis places, histories, and latent narratives.
-Themes to explore in programmed activities include:Practices and Methods of Urban Humanities: sharing creative scholarly methods, deploying new practices, testing field-focused approaches; considering where/how the urban humanities are situated within different institutionsMovement & Migrations: reflections on historiography, silences in the archive, reading against the grain, critical fabulation, counter-narratives; within the context of St. Louis, we are especially interested in watersheds, highways, movements and migrations of people, ideas, or materialsUnEarthing (ReEarthing): movements, studies, acts, and practices that daylight overlooked; underwritten, or previously unknown histories; intersections between this work and civic engagementFluidity: embracing the ever-changing dynamic state of the field and place; calling attention to the ebb and flow of space, histories, and power, and the consistent fits and starts of collaborationsEntanglements: connections, legacies, and bindings; engagements towards a shared understanding of disciplines (humanities + Design), cultural landscapes, (people + place), diasporas (movement + settlement), narratives, materials, and imaginaries (Utopias + Protopias)
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