The ICS-ULisboa Conference 2025 will take place on July 7, starting at 9:30 AM, in the Sedas Nunes Auditorium at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. This year, the conference is organized as part of the ERA Chair (European Research Agency) for the Study of Imagination and Society. The theme will be Spaces of Imagination. The event will be live on youtube.

What is the relationship between space and imagination? One could argue that any place in the world (including the world itself) has a double nature: the sensorial input received through the senses and the projection of a scenario made by our imaginative faculties. Although these faculties are the possession of individual minds, humans are by nature sociable beings, and thus both what they receive and what they imagine is mediated, contested, and problematized by the fact that we all live in plural world-making contexts. In this conference, several social scientists who have undertaken empirical and theoretical studies on place and space will gather to discuss the many relationships between space and imagination.

The conference will open at 9:30 a.m. with a Welcome Session featuring Marina Costa Lobo, Director of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and Ramon Sarró, ERA Chair in Imagination and Society at ICS-ULisboa and Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford. At 10:00 a.m., the keynote address will be delivered by Fátima Vieira, Vice-Rector for Culture at the University of Porto and Full Professor at FLUP, titled Hyperutopias and Micronations: The New Spaces of Social Imagination.

After the lunch break, Michael Keith from the University of Oxford will deliver the second keynote address, on Puzzles of the Imagination: Spaces of Urban Form and the Propensities of Urban Fabric. The event will end with a debate featuring renowned Portuguese architect Carrilho da Graça, one of the country’s most innovative architectural creators.

The conference is organized by Ramon Sarró, holder of the ERA Chair for the Study of Imagination and Society at ICS-ULisboa and Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford. See the full schedule.