Enfilade

From Boston University:

Crowd Control
The 37th Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture
(Online) 23–24 April 2021

Proposals due by 15 December 2020

Crowd control—as both an idea and an act—raises questions about agency, authority, and influence. From ancient Rome to Boston City Hall, state-sponsored architecture has policed the body and shaped the ideal of a citizen.Yet subtler forces such as painting, prints, and photographs also exert powerful influence. The events of this past year have heightened our awareness of both the power of the people and the contours of the systems which surround them. We have seen the wide array of structures that seek to order, pacify, neutralize, inspire, repress, or control the collective. The 37th Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture invites submissions examining images, objects, and structures that engage with the regulation and redirection of peoples and their social behaviors.

Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, the following: architecture, urbanism, and the organization of private and public spaces; monuments, memory, and civic structures; masquerade, carnival, and festivals; ceremonies and processions; exhibitions and viewing conditions; pilgrimage and religious institutions; protest, policing, the carceral system, and surveillance; population control, eugenics, urban growth and decline; collective and mass culture; conquest, colonialism, coloniality, xenophobia; caste, race, and social hierarchies.

We welcome submissions from graduate students at all stages of study, from any area of study. Papers must be original and previously unpublished. Please send an abstract (300 words or fewer), a paper title, and a CV to bugraduatesymposiumhaa@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2020. Selected speakers will be notified by early February. Papers should be 15 minutes in length and will be followed by a question and answer session. The symposium will be held virtually on Friday, 23 April, and Saturday, 24 April 2021, with a keynote lecture by Dr. Paul Farber, Director of Monument Lab and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

This event is generously sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities; the Boston University Department of History of Art & Architecture; and the Boston University Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture Association.