IASTE 2018: The Politics of Tradition
16th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE)
October 4-7, 2018 | Coimbra, Portugal
Past IASTE conferences have dealt with themes as diverse as Value, Myth, Utopia, Border and many others. This conference intends to prolong this collective reflection by foregrounding an examination of the ways in which the domain of the political and traditions in and of the built environment are intertwined. While the political in traditions has always been part of the debate at IASTE conferences, at a time of struggles globally around the meaning and the practices of political participation in making the built environment, it is valuable to address how the built environment has been shaped by state apparatuses or by citizens to advance diverse political positions, often deploying imaginaries of tradition, purportedly rejecting emerging spatial practices and political subjectivities.
Consequently, the conference will offer reflections both on the importance of the concept of tradition for the political question in itself and on the ways in which variants of governance structures face the question of tradition in the built environment. Participants are encouraged to question the practice of tradition in the production of space in relation to different regimes of politics. In addition, the conference will examine the systems of politics as a category of tradition, reflecting on how the construction and deconstruction of professional political bodies act on the built environment.
As in past IASTE conferences, scholars and practitioners from architecture, architectural history, art history, anthropology, archeology, folklore, geography, history, planning, sociology, political science, urban studies, and related disciplines are invited to submit papers that address one of the following tracks: