An International Conference Event: “All That Melts into Air Is Solid: World of Change”
Bulletin on 10 June 2025: Final Week to Send Abstracts! Second Keynote Speaker Confirmed.
The Department of Communication at Saint Louis University’s Madrid, Spain campus announces an upcoming international, interdisciplinary conference that examines change from a wide panorama of angles.
The conference will take place across Thursday and Friday, 2-3 October 2025 on the SLU-Madrid Campus, close to central Madrid (seven metro stops from Puerta del Sol).
We invite abstracts of 250 words, plus up to six key words, by 15 June 2025. Decisions to invite candidates will happen shortly after the due date to assure adequate time for participants to make travel plans as needed.
Call for Papers
In the epochal year of 1989, as the Cold War ostensibly heaved and began to expire, David Harvey discussed time/space compression. In Harvey’s view, the techniques and technologies of capitalism were associated with profound changes in the quotidian practices of everyday life; deeply inscribed changes included the fundamental categories of time (speed up by neoliberal convulsions) and space (shrunk down by waves of innovations in media and transport). With similar theoretical reach at the same moment, Arjun Appadurai’s famous 1990 essay proposed five “-scapes” in which globalized activity and change occurs. In particular, Appadurai posits ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes that are further complexified by their disjunctive boundaries. In the decades following these theoretical contributions, the upheavals of multiply-determined changes in life across the globe have become more acute.
It is time to take stock.
We will try to revive the ambitious scope of past studies on constant change in daily life, as seen through media in all its forms, politics, culture, the economy, political economy, and patterns of social interaction. We are also interested in specifying what really is a rupture with the past and what presents old wine in new bottles.
Topics and case studies are limited only by the imagination and include these central concerns:
-Crisis in all its dimensions, including invented crises and real ones that are ignored
-Mediated representation of change & crisis
-New contours of the news
-Neoliberalism & its cultural concomitants
-Social media tidal waves
-Stops & starts in globalization
-Identities under construction
-The tense alliance between online and f2f life
We are also interested in abstracts that address topics that may include the following:
-The shape-shifting European Union and the discourses that surround it
-Novel forms of mobility
-New geographies of power
-Utopia & dystopia (and representations of them)
-New forms of conflict and cohesion
-Shifts in media industries
-The metamorphosizing classroom
Keynote Speakers
The conference has confirmed the participation of two keynote speakers: Christopher A. Chávez (School of Journalism and Communication, Carolyn Silva Chambers Distinguished Professor, University of Oregon) and Jack Z. Bratich (School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University).
Application to Participate
Apply to participate through this form:
About Us
Saint Louis University in Madrid is the international campus of Saint Louis University in Missouri that has been in continuous operation since 1967 and currently enrolls 1,400 students instructed by 150 faculty members. The campus offers 22 majors in addition to 29 minors. Alongside accomplishment in the classroom, SLU-Madrid is characterized by active research and outreach as it stakes its claims as the premier US-affiliated campus in Europe.
About Madrid, Spain
Spain is perhaps the most dynamic country in the European Union and Madrid constitutes its geographic, governmental and economic center. The Global Power City Index’s 2024 ratings rates Madrid as the tenth most “magnetic” city in the world for its amalgam of culture, livability, research and development, economic activity, environmentalism and accessibility.
Contact
Questions? The conference email address is: