[Lee B. Abraham]

Call for Papers
Approaches to Teaching and Learning with Urban Spaces

49th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention
Global Spaces, Local Landscapes and Imagined Worlds
April 12-15, 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
NeMLA Web Site: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been characterized by changes that lead to increasing literary and cultural productions (e.g. narratives, short stories, poetry, films) about urban spaces and experiences (Fraser, 2015). First, the spatial turn in the humanities in the 1990s, defined as, the “recognition of how concepts of space bind history, culture, and memory” (Bodenhamer, 2007, p. 99) resulted in studies involving literary mapping and other geospatial approaches to texts in what had previously been a preoccupation with time/temporality in literary and cultural studies (Connor, 1989). Second, a focus on space and place occurred within a context of rapid globalization and movement and flows (Appadurai, 1996; 2013) of people, money, technology, media, and ideologies into cities (Sassen, 2001), with more than half of the world’s population now living in cities (United Nations, 2014).

The primary goal of this roundtable is to discuss and debate pedagogical approaches that meaningfully engage and connect students with urban spaces (local, global, imagined) in literature and cultural studies courses and foreign language classes. In so doing, the roundtable seeks to address a gap between the ever-expanding literary and cultural productions about cities and the need for faculty to be able to teach with and about urban spaces given the two profound changes described previously.

Presenters in this roundtable could address the following questions

1) What pedagogical approaches (for example: what types of assignments, the use of digital tools/technologies for assignments about/in cities, online collaborations with students) have been used such that students meaningfully engage, interact, and examine urban spaces in language, literary, and cultural studies courses?

2) What were some of the major challenges of teaching and learning about and with urban spaces? How were these challenges addressed and overcome?

Please submit a 300-word abstract to Lee B. Abraham through the NeMLA website by September 30, 2017. https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login

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