To browse Academia. It is also a road, a promenade, the place where beach meets cityscape. It is a limit as well as a line. It is the site of encounter, conflict and confrontation. As borders are reinforced and sea levels rise, spaces of inclusion become those of exclusion. The strand gives way to the stranded, marooned, isolated, imprisoned and alienated. This series presents a range of perspectives and critical methodologies aimed at questions of space and our sociocultural engagement with it.
As such it incorporates studies and approaches from cultural studies, literature, film and media studies, anthropology, political science, architecture and human geography. International Conference at Amerikahaus Munich, June, Keynote: Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University The beach has recently become the site of important transformations: understood in the context of mass tourism for many years, nowadays we perceive the beach as bearing witness to the arrival of refugees, to pollution and climate change e.
The European Β»invention of the beachΒ«, which Alain Corbin situates approximately in the 18th century, is connected to a myriad of discourses and practices which crystallize at, and are projected onto, the beach. In this respect, the conference will trace the manifold, changing, and at times competing representations and experiences of the beach in artwork, culture, and society as well as the many cultural imaginaries of the beach in their global and historical diversity.
As such, the beach is at once liminal and multiple, determined by the juxtaposition of land, ocean and sky as well as the blurring of the lines that separate them. It can turn from a representational space to a living space, and is at times perceived as a non-place or a heterotopia. Contributions could investigate these and other aspects from the point of view of changing cultural, medial, or aesthetic forms.
But even when not thinking of such sociocultural ties, the beach remains a fluid and a non-localizable space which constitutes itself mainly via relations: for example, it is dependent on, yet also autonomous from, the sea and water, the harbor, urban structures, and other forms of the shore and the coast.
