|
CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES WHAT IS THE CROSSROADS CONFERENCE? The international Crossroads conferences were started in 1996 in Tampere, Finland to fill what we felt was a gap in the international cultural studies community. Although cultural studies was becoming increasingly international and multi-centered - or rather centerless because of its virtual nature - cultural studies people had scarse opportunities to see each other and socialize. Specific cultural studies conferences or seminars were occasional and often advertized only within a particular region. Yet the very character of cultural studies as a meeting place, as a crossroads between different people and disciplines desperately pleads for international conference. That is what we did, and the mission statement of the first Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference still holds today:
The first conference was an immediate success, attracting some 500 people from 38 countries around the world. Therefore, it was decided that the Crossroads conference will be a regular event, organized every second year. The second Crossroads conference was organized in Tampere in 1998 and the third in 2000 in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Birmingham, the hometown of the legendary Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, attracted over 900 participants. After the Birmingham conference, the plan was that the international tour of the Crossroads conference will continue to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, Joke Hermes did not manage to get funding for the arrangements, and another attempt to arrange it in Canada failed because there was no available venue for it at that time. Therefore, the conference will again take place in Tampere, but we confident that after 2002, an endless world tour of the Crossroads in Cultural Studies biannual conference will get more wind under its wings and will also take it to other continents than Europe. Call for future Crossroads organizers Where the Crossroads conference will be organized in future years is also up to you. Before the Crossroads 2002 conference, we kindly ask you to contact us and send us a proposal for organizing the next conference. Hopefully, in the Crossroads 2002 there will already be a meeting that decides where the Crossroads is going next, so that preliminary information about the Crossroads 2004 can be given to the participants. Could your institution organize the next Crossroads conference? It takes some time and energy, but it has its obvious gains. Although the organizers of the previous Crossroads conferences can provide a tested, working system, including written material as tools and instructions, organizing the conference requires a local team and financial support from the university, government or other sponsor. In return, the local organizing group will greatly benefit from the intellectual inspiration that a big international conference brought to their doorsteps will give not only them but to the whole local academic community. In addition, the local organizing institution will gain a lot of international visibility as a place where cultural studies is practised. We ask you to seriously think about it. Maybe organizing the Crossroads conference is just the boost that your institution needs. If you are at all interested, please do not hesitate to contact us and ask for more information. Proposal Form For Future Crossroads Organizers The mission of the Crossroads conference is to provide an open forum for all topics that interest the diverse international cultural studies community. In that way, the conference will also show where cultural studies is going next. To succeed in this, we especially encourage you to send us session proposals. You may propose a session with a complete list of participants, or just send us the title and session abstract, so people can see it advertised and contact you with their paper proposals. As said, you are free to propose sessions on any topics of interest to the cultural studies community, but we assume that the following topics will in one way or another be tackled in the sessions:
If you are interested in organizing sessions on those or other topics, please contact the organizers by filling out and sending a session proposal. You can of course only send a paper proposal to a session organizer (see the regularly updated list of sessions) or directly to the organizers. |