Post-Pandemic Imaginaries Conference 2024
Post-Pandemic Imaginaries
Space, Culture and Memory after Lockdown
A two-day international conference
5th and 6th September 2024
Organised by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life (CCEL)
at the School of the Arts, University of Liverpool, UK
This two-day interdisciplinary conference explores changes in the experience and imagining of everyday urban spaces following the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on the processes of reimagining, remembering and remapping of everyday culture and experience through a post-pandemic lens. It considers the heterotopic glimpses of a post-pandemic world that may have happened under lockdown, galvanised by a collective experience of space and time that transformed everyday living and the alternative, virtual forms of social and spatial relationships that were brought into play. It looks at how the everyday urban imaginary was reconfigured, the combination of dystopian and utopian moments, the contrasts between chaotic and overcrowded confinement for some, and pause and rest offered to others. If there was a utopian impulse amid the terrors of the pandemic, what did it look like, and what traces remain? Did the projected imaginings of post-pandemic urban futures contribute to substantive changes that are discernible now? 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 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?
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.