The Nocturnal City as a Common Good
Plural Uses · Unequal Access · Competing Claims
6-8 October 2027 · Fully online
Call for Papers
Night does not arrive as an empty interval waiting to be filled with activity. It reorganises how places are inhabited and used, by whom, and under what conditions. Within the same city, at the same hour, a hospital worker may be travelling to a shift, residents attempting to sleep, friends gathering in a public square, cultural workers dismantling an event, and nocturnal species responding to an altered lightscape. These situations belong to different nocturnal worlds, connected through shared spaces and infrastructures but characterised by unequal access to resources, security, visibility and recognition.
The notion of the nocturnal city as a common good offers a way of bringing these worlds into conversation without assuming that their interests coincide. It directs attention beyond the familiar opposition between promoting night-time activity and controlling its undesirable effects. It invites closer examination of how nocturnal spaces, services and opportunities are produced, appropriated, maintained and distributed; how competing uses are negotiated; and which forms of presence are recognised as legitimate. In this sense, the common good is less a settled model for urban policy than a contested social and political problem.
The conflicts involved are not merely abstract. The right to rest may encounter the right to gather and create culture; efforts to improve night-time safety may expand exclusionary forms of policing; the visibility associated with festivals and tourism may coexist with precarious work and mounting pressure on housing; demands for greater illumination may collide with environmental protection and the value of darkness. These tensions are shaped by local histories, economic arrangements, institutional practices and differentiated experiences of gender, class, race, age, sexuality and disability. They also unfold well beyond entertainment districts, in homes, transport systems, workplaces, peripheral territories and spaces usually absent from accounts of the urban night.
ICNS.LX8 seeks to make these complexities the starting point for interdisciplinary exchange. We welcome empirically grounded studies, theoretical interventions, historical and comparative analyses, creative research, and contributions from professional or community practice. Proposals may investigate the possibilities of treating nocturnal life as a common concern, challenge the assumptions behind that framing, or examine the unequal consequences of particular attempts to govern, commercialise, protect or transform the night. Urban cases are central to this edition, but research on rural, coastal, peripheral and translocal nightscapes is equally welcome when it helps rethink the relationships between night, collective life and spatial justice.
Held entirely online, the eighth edition of the International Conference on Night Studies will connect researchers, artists, practitioners, policymakers and civic actors working across different regions and knowledge traditions. This format enables participation without the need to travel while inviting careful attention to accessibility and differences in time zones. The conference offers space for established debates as well as emerging questions, methodological experimentation and perspectives that complicate prevailing accounts of nocturnal societies.
Suggested areas of contribution
The following areas are indicative rather than exhaustive. Contributions crossing several of them are especially welcome.
1. Public life, rights and the politics of the night
Competing claims to public space; access, belonging and exclusion; common resources; housing, noise and rest; everyday negotiation, informal rules and collective organisation.
2. Nightlife, culture and nocturnal sociabilities
Clubs, festivals, informal gatherings and subcultures; music and creative scenes; gendered, racialised and queer experiences; the changing meanings and uses of nocturnal public life.
3. Work, care, health and unequal temporalities
Night labour and supply chains; essential and invisible work; domestic and reproductive care; sleep, fatigue and well-being; rhythms, precarity and temporal inequalities.
4. Governance, regulation and contested safety
Licensing and zoning; noise disputes; policing and surveillance; harm reduction; local and comparative policy models; formal and informal modes of night-time governance.
5. Infrastructures, mobility and access
Public transport and last-mile journeys; service provision; accessible night-time environments; platforms and digital mediation; infrastructural failures and spatial disconnections.
6. Darkness, artificial light and nocturnal ecologies
Light pollution; dark-sky initiatives; energy and climate pressures; nocturnal biodiversity; ecological coexistence; competing social, cultural and environmental values of darkness.
7. Tourism, events and economic transformations
Night-time tourism; light and cultural festivals; touristification; commercial and informal economies; urban branding; event-driven change and its differentiated effects on communities.
8. Representing, experiencing and researching nights
Nocturnal imaginaries, memory and heritage; sonic and sensory worlds; arts and visual cultures; ethnography, rhythmanalysis, participatory approaches, mapping, data and research ethics.
Presentation formats
- Individual oral presentations (15 minutes, followed by discussion)
- Organised panels or roundtables (normally 3-4 coordinated contributions)
- Participatory workshops and methodological laboratories
- Short films and other research-based audiovisual contributions
Submission guidelines
- Abstract: 250-300 words, explaining the research question, approach and contribution
- Keywords: 4-6
- Language: English
- Submission form
Important dates
- Abstract submission deadline: 31 March 2027
- Notification of acceptance: 16 April 2027
- Conference: 6-8 October 2027 (fully online)
About ICNS
ICNS is a collaborative effort of the International Night Studies Network (INSN) and the LXNIGHTS Research Group with the institutional support of the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte), the Interdisciplinary Center of Social Sciences at NOVA University Lisbon (CICS.NOVA), the Institute of Sociology – University of Porto (ISUP).
Conference information: https://icnslx.com/
