Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and subsequent attempts at revitalizing (or gentrifying) its downtown area. As in many other US cities, urban renewal, integration, and other socioeconomic developments led to white flight, marginalized the African American population, and set the stage for the development of LGBTQ+ community building and subculture. Yet these usually segregated segments of society in Mobile converged once a year to create a common identity, that of a Carnival City. Carnival in Alabama looks not only at the people who participated in Mardi Gras organizations divided by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, but also investigates the experience of "marked bodies" outside of these organizations, or people involved in Carnival through their labor or as audiences (or publics) of the spectacle. It also expands the definition of Mobile's Carnival "tradition" beyond the official pageantry by including street maskers and laborers and neighborhood cookouts. Using archival sources and oral history interviews to investigate and analyze the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African American men and women and people who defied gender and sexuality normativity in the festivities (regardless of their racial identity), this book seeks to understand power dynamics through culture and ritual. By looking at Carnival as an "invented tradition" and as a semiotic system associated with discourses of power, it joins a transnational conversation about the phenomenon.

IBERAMIA is the international conference series of the Ibero-American Art- cialIntelligencecommunitythathasbeenmeetingeverytwoyearssincethe1988 meeting in Barcelona. The conference is supported by the main Ibero-American societies of AI and provides researchers from Portugal, Spain, and Latin Am- ica the opportunity to meet with AI researchers from all over the world. Since 1998, IBERAMIA has been a widely recognized international conference, with its papers written and presented in English, and its proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI series. This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at Iberamia 2008, held in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2008. For this conference, 147 papers were submitted for the main track, and 46 papers were accepted. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee (PC), coor- nated by an Area Chair. In certain cases, extra reviewerswererecruited to write additional reviews. The list of Area Chairs, PC members, and reviewers can be found on the pages that follow. The authors of the submitted papers represent 14 countries with topics c- ering the whole spectrum of themes in AI: robotics and multiagent systems, knowledge representation and constraints, machine learning and planning, n- ural language processing and AI applications. TheprogramforIberamia2008alsoincludedthreeinvitedspeakers:Christian Lemaitre (LANIA, M exico), R. Michael Young (NCSU, USA) and Miguel Dias (Microsoft LDMC, Lisbon) as well as ?ve workshops.

Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and subsequent attempts at revitalizing (or gentrifying) its downtown area. As in many other US cities, urban renewal, integration, and other socioeconomic developments led to white flight, marginalized the African American population, and set the stage for the development of LGBTQ+ community building and subculture. Yet these usually segregated segments of society in Mobile converged once a year to create a common identity, that of a Carnival City. Carnival in Alabama looks not only at the people who participated in Mardi Gras organizations divided by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, but also investigates the experience of "marked bodies" outside of these organizations, or people involved in Carnival through their labor or as audiences (or publics) of the spectacle. It also expands the definition of Mobile's Carnival "tradition" beyond the official pageantry by including street maskers and laborers and neighborhood cookouts. Using archival sources and oral history interviews to investigate and analyze the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African American men and women and people who defied gender and sexuality normativity in the festivities (regardless of their racial identity), this book seeks to understand power dynamics through culture and ritual. By looking at Carnival as an "invented tradition" and as a semiotic system associated with discourses of power, it joins a transnational conversation about the phenomenon.