Organised by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life at the School of
the Arts, University of Liverpool, UK

*Keynote speakers:*

*Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University)*

Stef is Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he
directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. He has authored or
edited numerous books, special journal issues and articles on trauma,
memory, climate change and eco-emotions as mediated through culture.

*Professor Dawn Lyon (University of Kent)*

Dawn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. She has
published widely on the sociology of work, time and everyday life. Her
recent research includes analysis of accounts of everyday life collected
by Mass Observation during the Covid-19 Pandemic, attending to rhythm
and future imagining.

*Call for Papers*

The Centre for Culture and Everyday Life (CCEL) invites contributions to
a two-day interdisciplinary conference exploring changes in the
experience and imagining of everyday urban spaces following the COVID-19
pandemic. The aim of the conference is to focus critical attention not
on the impact of the pandemic and associated government lockdowns, but
on the processes of reimagining, remembering and remapping of everyday
culture and experience through a post-pandemic lens.

A key focus of enquiry are the real-and-imaginary geographies of
everyday experiences under lockdown where the imagination was put to
work in ways that often elicited heterotopic glimpses of a post-pandemic
world that may, in the years since, have all but slipped into oblivion.
During lockdown, the ‘spatial play’ (Marin 1984) of the utopic
imagination – the interplay of horizons and frontiers as negotiated
through forms of everyday social and spatial practice – was galvanised
by a collective experience of space and time that transformed the
affective contours of everyday living. As physical movements and
interactions were compressed into the individualised landscapes of
lockdown, alternative, virtual forms of social and spatial relationships
were brought into play. Whether by ensconcing oneself in virtual spaces
or by venturing anew into the suddenly depopulated landscapes of local
urban neighbourhoods, reconfigured forms of individual spatial agency
brought with them a corresponding reconfiguring of the everyday urban
imaginary.

For some, dystopian scenarios familiar from literature and film were
offset by small utopian moments: the impulse of planners and city
councils to take the opportunity to engage citizens in reimagining urban
space, moments of community and togetherness amid the enforced
separations, an absence of traffic noise and pollution, and newly
audible birdsong. Videos shared online that showed wild animals roaming
the streets, and even memes ridiculing the notion that “nature is
healing”, may have even offered some momentary respite from ongoing
climate anxiety. While for many people, confinement could be experienced
as chaotic, overcrowded, and made work-time almost endless, for others
it opened up time to reflect, and to pause, to imagine how their lives
might be otherwise.

If there was a utopian impulse amid the terrors of the pandemic, what
did it look like, and what traces remain? Is there an ethical and
aesthetic imperative to salvage the residual glimpses, fragments, dreams
and imaginaries engendered by the pandemic? In what ways, if any, did
the projected imaginings of post-pandemic urban futures contribute to
substantive changes that are discernible now, four years on? How are the
lived spaces and temporalities of cities qualitatively different today
from what they were in 2019? Are they different or was it all just a
blip? What traces of pandemic behaviour and experience remain in our
daily interactions? Has the pandemic brought about a keener awareness
and value of the local? How did art and photography respond to the
temporary transformation of public and social space? How have forms of
everyday mobility changed? Are there post-pandemic spatial stories that
reveal a transformation in how people engage with and imagine everyday
urban spaces? And if there are, what do these spatial stories look like?
What do they say and how might they be traced or mapped? What does
re-engaging the everyday mean in a post-pandemic world?

We welcome proposals addressing these issues from scholars at all career
stages and a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds.

Abstract Submission: Please send abstracts (300 words max.) with your
name, title, affiliation (where appropriate) and a short bio (up to 200
words). Please prepare for a 20 minute presentation

by 10 May 2024 to the conference organizers:
CCELconference2024@liverpool.ac.uk

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 7th June 2024