CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Cultural Studies, Culture and Freedom
Sessions
Organiser: Álvaro Pina
Cultural Studies, Culture and Freedom:
Freedom
Offord, Baden (Southern Cross
University, Australia) FREEDOM OF/FROM CULTURE
This paper explores the notion of freedom in relation to cultural studies and
its concern for examining the power-laden nature of contemporary culture and
society. Moving from a political position where cultural studies is regarded
primarily as an intellectual movement that strives to evaluate and interrogate
modern society, this paper offers two responses. First, the embedded nature of
freedom within the cultural studies project is unpacked in order to clarify the
meaning and aims of emancipatory politics. Second, the paper offers an incursion
into the field of cultural studies through the thoughts of the Indian
philosopher J. Krishnamurti, well known for his questioning of authority and his
view that knowledge does not bring freedom. Taking up his ideas on freedom and
the individual, the paper explores the limits of freedom as conceived through
the tradition of cultural studies, and questions the purpose of liberation,
participatory and emancipatory processes.
Lopes, Ana Isabel (College of Higher
Education, Leiria, Portugal) "AND WHAT, THEN, IS FREEDOM?": THE
POSSIBILITY OF FREEDOM IN RAYMOND WILLIAMS'S IDEA OF A COMMON CULTURE
In Jürgen Habermas's account, as a liberating project modernity 'can and will
no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models
supplied by another epoch'. Against the pre-determined codes of past epochs,
modernity 'has to create its normativity out of itself'. Modernity entails the
future-oriented possibility of freedom which, according to Raymond Williams,
only is realisable through a common culture. Being a 'free, contributive and
common process of participation in the creation of meanings and values', the
making of a common culture 'can never be supposed at any time to have finally
realized itself, to have become complete'. Williams's earlier assumption that 'a
culture, essentially, is unplannable' already put forward that freedom is to be
achieved in lived social experience. My paper articulates Williams's idea of a
common culture and Habermas's approach to modernity as an unprecedented project.
Gil, Marília (University of Lisbon,
Portugal) WHAT HAVE LATE VICTORIAN CINDERELLAS DONE TO THEIR CHAINS OF FREEDOM?
Freedom and equal opportunities are recurrent themes in Mona Caird's work. In
her essays, namely The Morality of Marriage (1897), she confronts the
paradoxical ideas and attitudes of the late Victorian public sphere with the new
demands of freedom of the late nineteenth-century Cinderellas. Cinderellas did
not expect a miraculous crystal shoe to transform their peculiar position in
society. They claimed a democratic theory and practice of gender issues, a
culture of active citizenship, with no powerful shoes permanently binding them
to husbands dictating the rules. Their struggle for autonomy transformed the
pumpkin into their own carriage. Inside, free fleshy fairies tried to follow
their own way, but deep in their minds a voice was whispering, 'Once upon a time…'
Cultural Studies,
Culture and Freedom: Hegemony and technologies of freedom
Keller, Margit (University of Tartu,
Estonia) MOBILE TELEPHONY, TECHNOLOGY OF FREEDOM: ANALYSIS OF PRINT ADVERTISING
OF ESTONIAN MOBILE TELEPHONY 1992-2001
The present paper focuses on one way of looking at the transformation of the
meaning of freedom in post-communist society of Estonia. For this print
advertising from 1992-2001 of mobile telephony - a technology of strong sign
value - has been chosen. The paper argues that the representation of freedom
moves in the direction of postmaterialism; political connotations subside and
instrumental-rational, mainly economy-related connotations give more space to
hedonist-individualist values that are characteristic to the development of
western-style consumer culture (e.g. representation of mobile telephony as a
symbol of the freedom of foreign travel and business gives prominence to
discourses of free time, free self-expression and hedonism). For the study 125
ads were content-analysed as a result of which most distinctive texts were
selected for qualitative analysis. The whole argument is set in the context of
consumer culture theories outlining consumer sovereignty as a "mundane
version of civic freedom".
Anttila, Anu-Hanna (University of Turku,
Finland) ABOUT FREE-TIME AND FREEDOM: THEORETICAL ASPECTS TO LEISURE TIME OF
MODERN INDUSTRIAL WORKERS
The modern industrial society has meant the constructing a new type of worker,
which has been called Fordist or Taylorist worker. In the western National
States the leaders and moral regulators have been educating the people to
understand what is "right" and "normal" with the so-called
cultural edifying project. In this project the new worker has learned e.g. how
to use time and money properly. This demand for even more conscious time
planning and disciplined working has meant the rationalisation of leisure time,
too. The so-called spare time has to be minimized and the new worker has to
educate and cultivate himself - both physically and intellectually. The reasons
for these demands have been both economical and political: the rationalisation
of time using has yielded more profit and the workers have grown up more
conscious consumers and citizens.
Ray, G. Thomas (Western Michigan
University, USA) GLOBALIZATION, METAPHOR, AND MODERNITY
One way of thinking about language and hegemony has to do with effects of
modernistic discourse on groups whose economies and other cultural traditions
depend on social structures of kinship, community, and relationships with the
natural world. The purpose of this paper is to show how certain metaphors
embedded in the language of what is alternatively known as modernity, modernism,
or the modern/industrial worldview - in particular, the language involving
progress, freedom, and autonomy - undermine traditions that maintain community
solidarity and sustainable human-Earth relationships, and to show how
modernity's promise of individual freedom and emancipation, while accurate in
many ways, in fact carries its own hegemonic organizing limitations. I give
particular attention to how these metaphors are embedded in the discourse of
global economics.
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