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CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES ACCEPTED SESSIONS and ABSTRACTS Sessions have been arranged here according to their thematic fields. You will notice that themes are very spacious. Please note that the sessions are linked under the themes. Both the themes and sessions are in alphabetical order.
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Achievements, Obstacles, and Exemplars in Audience Research As research into the power and influence of media consumption has become more sophisticated, debates in popular culture about media’s influence over viewers have remained relatively crude. In these debates, violent, sexual and discriminatory behaviors are repeatedly linked directly to media content. Media messages are superficially held accountable for some of society’s most troubling and complex problems. While these accusations contain truth, they bypass a more complex understanding of the ways in which meaning is created between media messages and media audiences. Under what constraints do audiences make meaning out of media messages? How does one measure media influence? What responsibilities do media researchers have to their participants and society in general? Cultural studies has consistently provided a framework blending theory, method and activism to guide scholars dedicated to examining the intricacies of media influence. This panel invites papers raising questions, suggesting alternative frameworks and goals, and providing exemplars about audience research. Organiser: |
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The Joint
Session for AIDS and the Body/ Cultural Differences Between the Hearing World
and the Deaf World: A Conflict Between Cultures
AIDS and HIV infection have changed the way that bodies are perceived and represented. With new technologies for treatment, bodies that were once represented as "sick" are now perceived as "well" and this has had a significant impact on risk perception, risk management, identity mangement and cultural constructions of sexual communities. Redeveloping out of this change is a public sexuality based on new cultural forms that subvert traditional understandings of wellness and illness. Of particular interest are papers that look at the intersection of other identities (race, class, gender, nationality) and compare various cultural contexts (Europe and Asia) as they pertain to the construction of the body in the Era of AIDS. Every culture possesses its own hierarchies, ideologies, and discourses, which are related to the ways power and domination are articulated within its boundaries. Researchers argue that there is no unified culture, but a combination of cultures that encompasses the dominant (group that establishes values and interests, and governs social practices) and the subordinate culture (group that should “obey” and follow the values and interests of the dominant group). Apparently, the normally hearing world (the overwhelming majority within society) has a large influence over the Deaf world based on auditory skills. This includes the power/control some sectors of the hearing population enjoy over major social/public institutions and spheres. Consequently, the hearing world can be viewed as the dominant and the Deaf world as the subordinate culture. This session will explore the struggles between the hearing and the Deaf world and the efforts of the Deaf culture to maintain its cultural identity. Organisers: Ana Cruz Bodies, Technology, Aesthetics Sessions While the alleged disembodiment of cyberspace has featured prominently in discourses about newer technologies, the aesthetic experiences facilitated by these media have also generated considerable interest amongst promoters, users and cultural theorists.
Organiser: Dissection, Animality, Anachronism and Murder: Dangerous Bodies in Discourses of Modernity This panel traces trajectories of dangerous or non-normative embodiment, beginning with European early modern medical texts and late Ming discourses of non-reproductive sexuality, and then moving to contemporary Taiwan to examine how the cultural memory of these and other shadow influences is refigured in texts that speak to Taiwan's layered modernity. Issues to be explored include how the conceptualization of the body (especially in pieces) is related to spatiality and temporality, how the ethics of the body travels in cultural texts, and how discourses of modernity stigmatize certain queer embodiments while legitimating others. Organiser: Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health and Economies of Power From the ways in which historically changing definitions of eating disorders parallel shifts in political regimes, to the ways in which discourses on 'pathological' computer use provide a 'therapeutic' legitimation to gendered management strategies both at home and in the workplace, it has become increasingly evident that the ways in which people relate to issues of health and bodies is highly social and gendered, and is deeply political. Drawing on Foucault's notion of 'governance', the panel brings together empirically grounded and analytically sophisticated case studies that examine these nexuses between the micropolitics of health, gendered forms of embodiment, and the macropolitics of social, and often global, regimes of power. Organiser: |
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Consumption and Consumer Culture Dress/clothing is the most visible and tangible medium for human beings in communicating their identities and controlling their bodies in cultural and natural environments. Clothing is the borderline of the self and the outside world. Clothing functions in a human being's environment and it is an environment itself. It offers an opportunity to express individual and communal ideas as well as to hide them in the pressure of enforced ideologies. This session invites contribution of dress/clothing/fashion scholars from divers disciplinary backgrounds to discuss conceptual insight and methodological applications whether is a question of ethnic dress, fashion creations or clothing development for environmental challenges. Organisers: Ritva Koskennurmi-Sivonen Consumer Culture, Cultural Politics and the Circulation of Value This session aims to explore new ways of conceptualising consumer culture as the historically and culturally specific circulation of values. These values may be conceived as capitalist, ethical, commercial, colonial or postcolonial, bodily or embodied values, sign values, gendered values etc. They may circulate in temporal and spatial networks in complex and as yet unexplored ways. The papers submitted for this session may include - bodily consumption experiences, the material and symbolic currencies of consumer culture, transformations in value, values and materiality, commercial values, fetish values, commercial politics of value, the politics of research on consumer culture. Organiser: Consumption and Construction of Tourist Landscapes The session invites papers which explore modes of leisure, travelling and tourism in various "amenity-rich" landscapes. The idea of an amenity-rich landscape is used here to describe natural and cultural features that are valued for their particular contribution to quality of life and identity. Such landscapes often become targets of tourism and various sorts of touristic migrations, constructions and consumption. The process in which certain places, environments and communities are created, consumed, appropriated and preserved for either their uniqueness or its opposite, their repeatability, is considered worth critical cultural studies as part of ecological, regional, economical and social politics, especially in peripheral and natural areas but also in urban environments. A special emphasis will be put on the aspects of future developments in both the substantial area and the research methodologies.
Organisers: The Discourse of Travel in a Portable Age For centuries, travel writing has recorded and represented encounters with the 'other', but today, travel writing has a reputation for pulp non-fiction, magazine fillers and clichés from the beaten track. Travel 'literature' is still taken seriously within traditional period papers in literature and history, but surely the whole discourse of travel itself, with its themes, motifs, theories, and practices requires more scrutiny within cultural studies. Postmodernity has revitalized the discourse of travel after its modern malaise, perversely, because it asks the question - 'why travel?' - with increased urgency. In this age of portability and hyper-mobility, does physical travel for leisure, discovery or adventure, serve any useful function socially, culturally or personally? Papers might address any aspect of the discourse of travel, or the idea of travel in a portable age, and refer to writing or film from any period'. Organiser: Media in Spaces of Consumption Sessions Media and popular culture in late modernity are commodified, as cultural industries distribute products via the market to their users. How does commodification relate to contemporary media practices? How are we to understand media use within frameworks created by consumption? This session invites papers that explore relationships between media consumption and the simultaneous production of experience, meaning, aesthetics, identity, relations, difference and community, as well as forms of symbolic expression that are an undeniable part of media use. The session is inspired by a major ongoing study of a shopping center as starting point for investigating a variety of media, including books, cameras, newspapers, video and mobile phones. Papers are also welcomed that analyze media practices within other consumption sites, particularly to examine relationships between the public and the private, the local and the transnational, between culture and commerce, homogeneity and diversity, and between past, present, and a dreamed-of future.
Organiser: The 'Things' of Tourism Cultures The study of cultures of tourism and its geographies, have begun to flow from new interdisciplinary critiques. This session acknowledges the intellectual power of some of these recent debates, especially in terms of material cultures and of tourism as populated by hybrids of the human and non-human. Such approaches have begun to show the ways things play critical roles in the unfolding of cultural events in relation to practices of tourism. The session works from the tourist as subjective individual, and from notions of power and citizenship to explore the dynamics, negotiations, and tensions in tourism in contemporary and historic cultures. Although we suggest possible themes, these are intended merely to provide points in what may be discussions of networks of relations - human and nonhuman: Material cultures of tourism - souvenirs, photos, 'postcards', tourism as performance and material memories and 'taking places home'. Organisers: David Crouch |
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After the collapse of "reel socialism", there has been a revival of the rule of law both at the level of political and theoretical debate. There is a worldwide mobilization in support of the rule of law. Kantian liberalism (Rawls and Habermas) has tended to overvalue the rule of law. But it enhances the rule of law's importance at the expense of culture which is built on collective norms and customs. Kantian liberalism underestimates the role of culture in understanding meaning of the rule of law in different communities. The objective of this session is to remember that the rule of law is neither a matter of revealed truth nor of natural order (Kahn, 1999, 6). In this respect, this session will demonstrate the ways culture of law has affected community's attitude toward the rule of law and of individual as the bearer of that culture. I invite papers focused on the culture of the rule of law in different communities. Papers that bring cultural focus to the study of the rule of law are welcome. Organiser: Religion and culture have always been closely linked. Religious extremism and terrorism, both in the east and in the west, have common factors and links can be made between them, regardless of cultural or national group. Yet even if we are affiliated with a 'non-extremist' religious group, or not consciously religious people at all, the religious attitudes and understandings inherent in our histories affect our judgments, our governments and social policies, and indeed affect the way we interpret the world outside our own culture. The religions of our histories have shaped our cultures and our worldviews, and continue to shape our interpretation of current events. This session proposes to explore the ways religion has affected, and still affects, culture and cultural attitudes. Organiser: |
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Cultural Studies, Education and Pedagogy Childhood Representations, Postmodernity and Cultural Pedagogy This theme intends the dialogue with research works which illustrate a socially constructed childhood, defined by subjective positions of class, gender, race, abilities, age, local/global, etc. It will gather papers based on the theoretical frameworks of cultural pedagogy/cultural studies (Giroux, McLaren, Kellner) and media studies (McRobbie, Curran, García Galera), supported by feminist post-structuralist perspectives (Walkerdine, Ellsworth, Luke.) The session will focus on the interpretation of situations of transit from a modernist childhood related to the enlightened, reformist and constructivist educational traditions, towards a postmodern childhood engaged with a cultural approach to girls and boys' everyday life. This is, a model of childhood which is not just school-and-family-centered, but represented as well through other processes of the cultural production of subjectivity. The session intends to be inclusive, and searches for studies dealing with the reconstruction of infancy discourses produced from different places of pedagogy (cultural studies, media studies, postmodern psychology, etc.) Organiser: Cultural Studies and/in Education The relationship between cultural studies and
the field of education remains curiously contradictory: it is underemphasized in
cultural studies circles in terms of the historical relationship between the two
fields and yet rapidly expanding in education circles in terms of current
developments. For example, despite Raymond Williams repeated assertion that
cultural studies originated in the field of Adult Education and despite the fact
that early CCCS work included work on education and two successive Education
Groups, the adult education origin of cultural studies has been marginalized in
favor of the expansive narrative of the crises in the Humanities and social
sciences as cultural studies originary moment, and education is not discussed
much in cultural studies circles as a contributory field. On the other hand,
cultural studies has emerged and is being rapidly taken up in North American
radical education as successor to critical and multicultural theory and pedagogy
and furthermore, cultural studies is being institutionalized in the form of
cultural studies departments, sections and foci at colleges of education. This
panel explores such issues as the nature and profile of the historical and
contemporary relationship between cultural studies and education; the
contribution that cultural studies and education have Organisers: Karl Maton Conversations about Citizenship and Citizenship Education Citizenship itself is a concept immersed in ideological controversy. How is the concept of "good" and/or "active" citizenship understood and defined? How can we educate for "good" and/or "active" citizenship? Have recent citizenship education programmes sought to control the construction of citizens in a particular way? This session is inspired by recent surges in interest in civics and citizenship education in a number of countries. Papers are invited that add to recent dialogues and debates of national education programmes to further civics and citizenship understandings. Papers in this session may explore and critique recent cross-national civic and human rights education initiatives. If citizenship education fails to address the issues of, for example, human rights abuses, which are witnessed and lived on a massive scale, its role in building community at local, national and international levels must be seriously undermined. Papers are also welcome that analyse civic practices in a variety of ways and sites, which seek to redress social injustices and inequalities, in contexts ranging from the global to the local. Organiser: The Culture of "Other": Examining and Avoiding Stereotypes University teaching makes one very aware of the
ramifications of culture. Organiser: States of Containment: Culture and Pedagogy in the Neoliberal Order This session considers how corporate-produced cultural products, school curricula, and public discourses about race, gender, and discipline are schooling citizens in the virtues of neoliberal doctrine. Each paper discusses a different aspect of how neoliberalism affects education, in terms of funding distributions but also in terms of the language in which educational policy is couched and the content of curricula. Suggesting a Cultural Studies approach to schooling in which critical literacy is a major goal, this panel will address what educators can do to challenge oppressive knowledge and social relationships in schools and society. Organiser: "Playing the Game" in the Context of Globalisation: The New Political Economy of Higher Education This panel explores the ways university faculty and students are now 'playing the game' in Higher Education at a time when this game is becoming much more integral to processes of globalising capitalist production, distribution and consumption. Papers should draw on theoretical insights from Bourdieu, Lyotard, Bauman, Bernstein and/or others to develop ethnographic analyses of the ways Higher Education is being transformed in ways that are re-defining the power dynamics and thereby altering the games now being played in Higher Education. Papers should also consider the ramifications and implications of these games for their players and for the way education is being re-articulated in the nation and in a globalising economy at present. Organiser: Power Relations And Classroom Practice Sessions This session hopes to traverse the expanse between Cultural Studies and the field of education by articulating how relations of culture, knowledge and power are translated into classroom practices. Considering the classroom as a complex moment in time, place and being, and influenced by many particular forces such as the students' individual experiences, the institution of schools, and the larger social culture, this will explore how culture, knowledge and power become transmitted, produced, and suppressed in the lives of students. Intricacies within the students' physical and psychological environment, the atmosphere of a school i.e., the institution as an extension of the state or community, the teachers and administration at the particular school, and even the architectural design, and the larger social culture, are investigated, and in doing so, this session endeavors to elaborate progressive classroom practices that promote student praxis, and social and ethical responsibility.
Organiser: The University Now (and its Related Institutions of Interpretation) As a category and a collection of U.S. social, cultural, and political institutions, exactly what is "the university" currently becoming? Why? How? Given the close and complex connection between this and myriad other "institutions of interpretation," the implications of these matters of course hold significance for all citizens. But they are especially complicated and essential questions for graduate students planning careers of various sorts, as well as for current junior and senior faculty. This is partly because these questions are being increasingly acknowledged as entangled with *all* of our exegetical work in cultural studies, and perhaps in the contemporary humanities at large. In other words, they are starting to look a lot like "core" issues--rather than "just specialty" interests--for contemporary cultural theory and history. Papers dealing with any and all related topics are thus invited for participation in this panel; the more theoretically and/or historiographically self-conscious and inventive, the better. Organiser: |
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Cultural Economy and Imperialism This session is concerned with the production and definition of culture; what relation does the economy of culture have to the economy of imperialism? How does culture comply with, mediate, or resist imperialism. Topics include the use of cultural essentialism, difference or universalism in imperial discourse; contemporary cultural and artistic production in so far as it is embedded in imperial ideology; contestations of imperialism conceived in cultural format; whether the very notion of "cultural imperialism" makes sense in a global age; and the discourse of economic and regulatory institution in so far as it uses the notion of "culture" as an explanatory tool in the aid of control and regulation on a global scale. Organisers: Randall Halle Cultural studies, Culture and Freedom Sessions Although always implicit in cultural studies analyses and theories, freedom as concept and practice has received little explicit attention in them. The original emphasis in British cultural studies was on change, social change, but concepts such as hegemony and resistance, and their practices, conditions and effects, replaced that emphasis and occupied a central location and importance in its architectures of thought and analysis. Power and subordination, with culture as their sphere and instrument, have been explored; it is now time to explore culture in its emancipatory, liberating aspects and vectors. At a decisive stage in modernity, freedom was conceived of as necessity. But freedom can be thought as possibility, and in its effectiveness as reality-producing force. Modernity emerged as freedom to, but its hegemonic configurations replaced that originating impulse with the limit-setting logic of freedom from. I invite papers focused on the concept and practice of freedom in cultural studies.
Organiser: Disasters as Cultural Events Sessions Disaster studies have recently entered the scene of cultural studies, exploring how such events become meaning generating machines for political and social institutions, communities, and the media. However, few recent works explore the formation of disaster cultures from a comparative perspective, especially from the positions of disaster victims who must recreate worlds transformed by violence. This session encourages sharing of international views on how 20th-21st century disasters are represented and culturally defined, why some disasters seem of a larger scale than others, how institutions and governments attempt to assert control over disaster, how disaster communities articulate themselves, and what social forces make some communities especially vulnerable. Consideration of disasters ignored by the global media, as well as large-scale media events, such as Chernobyl, Bhopal, or the 9-11 attacks, would be welcome. Papers should discuss disaster in the context of cultural theory and/or history rather than empirical social science or public policy analysis. Organiser: Known best for concepts like 'rhizome', 'nomadology', 'smooth and striated space', Deleuze has been most insightful in trying to focus on empirical situations from a most abstract point of view. Very critical of generalisations, identifications and transcendence, Deleuze talks of processes, of what happens between the 'bodies'. Sometimes generalising, sometimes subjectifying, but processes all the same. Deleuze's thoughts have been very influential in many different fields of cultural theory and philosophy. From Foucault to Hardt & Negri, many scholars have been influenced by the way he wrote on cinema, the history of philosophy, art and feminism, to name a few of his interests. In this session we will see in what way Deleuze's thoughts have been insightful in some of these fields. However, we are also interested in how his thoughts can be useful in other areas of research, such as research on 'everyday life' subjects like food culture or fashion. This session on Gilles Deleuze is aimed at all scholars who are interested in 'doing' philosophy, as Rajchman put it, who are interested in how most abstract thought can help us see our (scholarly) practices in a different way. To put it another way, in this session we want to experience Deleuze's claim that philosophy equals life… Organiser: Intellectual Practices in Culture and Power: Transnational Dialogues Papers in this panel share the idea that Intellectual Practices are not limited to the academy and the writing of research and /or reflexive texts. Although this idea applies to any kind of Intellectual Practices, these papers discuss the issue with regard to the field of Culture and Power. Academic based "Cultural Studies" and other forms of trans-disciplinary studies challenge disciplinary boundaries in limited ways. Most of the times they do not offer a critique of the division of work between academic and non-academic (or not solely academic) intellectual practices. In this way, beyond the seemingly radical rhetoric many Cultural Studies perspectives not only reinforce such a division, but also contribute to both intellectually de-legitimize non-academic practices, and socially de-legitimize academic practices. The field of Culture and Power is particularly fertile for exploring ways of transgressing the established division of labour. This session has been conceived mainly based on the experience of the Practices of Latin American Intellectuals in diverse social movements (feminist, indigenous peoples, afro-descendants, human rights), as well as in "the arts" and so called "cultural industries", adult literacy initiatives, public policies design and debates, etc. The panel seeks to become a forum for Transnational Dialogues on these subjects, which allow us to learn from a diversity of experiences worldwide.
Organiser: The “Spatial Turn”, that is said to be currently taking place in Critical Cultural Theory revolves around the proposition that critical thought has traditionally favored a historical orientation towards understanding culture and society at the expense of a perspective that would give space a comparable consideration. Hence, the Spatial Turn refers to a recent and widespread revival of established modes of thinking about space (Harvey, Jameson, Soja) heavily inspired by the seminal works of theorists such as Bachelard and Lefebvre. Scholars from various disciplines such as cultural geography, urban studies, and criticism argue in favor of a reassesment of the role of space in contemporary daily life. The session would focus on identifying key moments in this shift in cultural theory, and open the relevant literature to discussion. Apart from this theoretical orientation, papers with more practical interests i.e. the spaces of everyday life are also encouraged. Organiser: Reanalysing Social and Cultural Concepts Local Cultures, Political Struggles and
Transformations Organisers: Dr Terence T.T. Pang When French Social Sciences Meet Cultural Studies Cultural Studies are full of references to French sociologists or philosophs (Barthes, Foucault, Certeau, Bourdieu, Baudrillard) but French research seems to be absent from the international landscape of Cultural Studies. How can we make sense of this paradox? We propose to give an answer thanks to a genealogy of the cultural field in France and the presentation of perspectives on the recent state of social/cultural research in this country. The international appropriation of French reknown thinkers has been selective (who really knows Passeron or Morin?) and sometimes very biased (especially with Bourdieu or Certeau), it has also hidden the complexity of the national trajectory and the reciprocal influence of British/American cultural studies. The present landscape is a very living one as it pays attention to cyberculture, soap operas, sport and music. The core of the renewal is sociology, may it be interactionist or more centered on the concept of mediation. Organiser: |
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City, Memory and Performing Body In the postmodern phase of urban discourse, an important aspect has been the unravelling of memories and their spatialisation. Memory and imagination have played a significant role in the perception of the built form. City has been seen as a site for collective memory. As per time, cultural contexts and circumstances in which they are formed, memories are inscribed and re-inscribed on city spaces. The session explores the manner in which the performing bodies shape and construct the ‘monument of memory’ - the monument that defines the past and relates it well to the present. Can performance become a key in translating memoirs into memorials? The session thus invites papers that explore and examine the idea of performativity in ‘city imaginaries’. Organiser: The idea of the panel is to present a discussion on the Brazilian cultural environment. It will be debated questions related to citizenship, the environmental quality of urban areas, projects of urbanistic intervention, preservation of cultural and architectural patrimony of the city and environmental regulation in urban areas. The presenters will approach such themes emphasizing issues from the culture of the individual and its perception of its own reality to the implemented policies, within a context of social disparity. The panel uncovers the challenges of conceiving policies more engaged with people's participation in the various aspects related to the mentioned themes. The session's expectation is to exchange knowledge on different realities with the objective to understand how people can deal culturally with their constraints of their social realities.
Organiser: This session invites scholars from various fields including anthropology, architecture, city planning, and literature to perform a cross-cultural and a cross-disciplinary reading of the city. Examples are culled from various cityscapes such as Berlin, Houston, and Istanbul. Although the foci of the papers are diverse, the panel will touch upon the issues of migration, queer space, space as façade and theater, and the notions of hybridity, all of which come together under the rubric of “otherness.” Some of the questions we will be looking at are: how otherness is negotiated in place making? What are the changing dynamics of the contemporary cities? How gender and ethnicity play a crucial role in the city cultures, especially at this postmodern turn? How can we evaluate the contributions of the “other” cultures to the contemporary culture of the cities from a historical perspective? And finally, how does globalization affect the culture of metropolis today? Organiser: In Between Spaces: Mapping Cultural Geographies of Istanbul Istanbul has been a crossroad for empires (Byzantine and Ottoman), continents (Europe and Asia), religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism), immigrants from all neighboring countries, capital and trade, and finally for diverse cultural interactions and productions. The power holders of the city actors have always negotiated and struggled to pursue their political visions to ‘control’ and ‘discipline’ the city and to make it one of the significant metropolises of the world. Hence each attempt has transformed the physical as well as social and cultural spaces of the city. The panel aims to become a forum for making dialogues on the cultural history and geography of Istanbul, which will offer us some useful tools to map contemporary cultural formations and dynamics of the city. The papers in this panel examine the struggle and relation between the old and the new, the mainstream and the marginal, the powerful and the powerless in order to understand different parameters and aspects of power that organize cultural spaces and form material contexts of everyday life. Organiser: Themes and the City: Themed Environments and the Construction of Urban Imaginaries The city as an imaginary space of (late) modernity has come to be understood as a complex cultural site in which multiple representations of the urban environment in architecture, film, and literature, as well as multiple negotiations of identification, locality and community, defy a straightforward sense of place and belonging. In this urban context themed environments and theme parks often impose a calculated, hegemonic ‘readability’ on the city, be it in the form of dominant narratives in tourist promotion and heritage centers or of particular architectural styles or other strategies of representing the city which are consistent in their efforts to reclaim or appropriate images, invent traditions, exoticize or familiarize place(s) and create a sense of belonging and community for some while marginalizing and excluding others. The session is intended to explore on the basis of case studies how these strategies of theming the city are communicated and mediated; how city imageries are exploited as a basis for acting on the built environment, reproducing social relations and promoting economic interests; and how they interface and interact with, and are contested by, the contingent social and cultural complexities of the modern city, opening up complex, cultural spaces, where alternative or subversive meanings and identifications can be negotiated. Organiser: |
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Environmental Cultural Studies Cultural Studies and the Natural Environment Except for a few seminal works, Cultural Studies has remained generally oblivious of the natural environment. As the ultimate "Other" of Western Culture, the environment represents both a concrete and intellectual terrain, which exists both in our cultural constructions but also outside of them. It also represents an interesting terrain and perspective allowing a new criticism and a radical decentering of the anthropocentrism still present in most Cultural Studies theory. What happens to the projects of identity-formation from an ecocentric perspective? What is the place of the natural environment in the emergence of the New Social Movements? What can an ecocentric perspective provide to the constant challenging of "common-sense"? How do media representations of the natural environment perpetuate an anthropocentric vision and enable disastrous practices? What would an ecologically-informed Cultural Studies look like? These and other questions would constitute the general theme of a session on Cultural Studies and the Natural Environment. Organiser: |
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Mapping the Present: Race and Culture in Contemporary Global (Trans)Formations The objective of this session is to locate race and culture in the contemporary global political scene. Existing theoretical and research-based explorations of strategic uses of these modern categories in constructions of subaltern subjects raise the question of whether and how Marxist, poststructuralist, feminist, and postmodern theorizing contribute to the understanding of emerging global subjectivities. Drawing from these (or others) critical theoretical contributions, this session aims to speak to the theoretical problem of the relationship between the economic and the symbolic (ideological or cultural) by examining global justice agendas (discourses and practices) concerned with how global economic trends impact peoples of color - e.g., gender/sexuality, indigenous rights, religious and cultural rights, civil and social rights, refugee rights, immigration, etc. Organiser: Politics and Poetics of Post-Colonialism and Ethnicity The theoretical insights of this session are based on cultural and postcolonial research especially around the concepts and ideas such as ethnicity, diasporic cultures, racialization, orientalism and cultural indentities. Multicultural imagination, practices and multidimensional perspectives on the identities and experiences of immigrants are explored and reflected in diverse material and settings. The session also aims to expand post-colonial discussions towards more material and embodied framework. Organiser: Post/Colonial Texts and Identities Sessions The discourse of post/coloniality evolves around a variety of topics. One of the most pertaining is the question of identity. To discuss this issue, we would like to organize a session devoted to the study of the ways in which post/colonial texts construct different forms of identity (national, sexual, gendered and racial). How should one understand the identificational aspects of post/colonial language and (literary) text? While the interests of the session lay mainly in the contextual study of literary texts and their context, potential contributors wishing to study any relevant theoretical and textual aspect of post/colonialism are encouraged to submit abstracts.
Organisers: Joel Kuortti "Post/Colonial" Approaches to Central Europe: Power, Ethnicity, and Culture 1848-1918 This session will discuss the complicate connection between symbolic forms and forms of ruling power in regard to the inner-European context. It will also include the question postcolonial concepts can be applied for phenomena as those of inner-European domination, the relationship between centre and periphery, the shift between West and East, the European nationalism. The main goal of the session is to gain deeper understanding of the processes of cultural symbolism in the context of Austria-Hungary and the political interrelationship of its constituent ‘peoples’ in regard to the enlargement of the European Union. The multi-ethnicity of the Habsburg Monarchy are to be in the centre of the session, but other examples in the European context are welcome (Prussian Germany, Scandinavia, Southern Europe, Ottoman Empire). Organisers: Wolfgang Müller-Funk Visual Art and Ethnicity: Lessons from Methodologies Of late, we have witnessed tremendous growth in the scholarship and criticism of ethnicity. In some situations, features of relationships between groups considering themselves and regarded by others as culturally distinctive are identified and celebrated as the basis for diversity and multiculturalism. In others, what counts as ethnicity is isolated territorially or purged through the violence of censorship or war. Much of the literature on ethnicity issues from political science, history, sociology and social anthropology, including their respective methodologies, conferences and journals, wherein scholars investigate how ethnic identity is embedded in certain social and cultural practices. Both parts of this session propose to examine the relationship of ethnicity to the visual arts by surveying how Cultural Studies methodologies can open for discussion contributions that visual art works, genres, forms, and practices make to constituting, representing, or contesting ethnic identities. Organiser: (White) Britishness and its Racialised Others The interrelationship between constructions of meaning and practices of power, i.e., the poetics and politics of representation, have always been a central concern in cultural studies. More recently, race, nation and identity have become central themes. The panel will focus on the construction and contestation of dominant notions of Britishness. The position of people of colour in post-colonial Europe has its roots in the 19th century, when colonialism was pre-eminent in the formation of nationalist discourses and identities. Yet, this is not how White European identities are usually lived. Dominant notions of ‘Britishness’ were formed by colonialism and then further complexified since World War Two by inward migration, devolution, globalisation and the end of Empire. The panel looks at aspects of the role of literature, visual imagery and history in inscribing and re-inscribing Britishness in particular historical and institutional locations. Organisers: Whiteness and the Racialised 'Other' Sessions When speaking of 'race', the 'problem' largely continues to be conceptualised as residing with the Other and the "cultural gaze of surveillance - whether it be a gaze of pity, blame or liberal hope" (Fein, 1997, 64) has remained squarely focused on people of colour. Thus in Australia, as elsewhere, Indigenous and immigrant peoples positioned as 'non-white', have frequently been the object of research and have been constructed either as deviant, culturally impoverished or as powerless victims. Instead of equating race with 'studying down' in the power structure and focussing attention almost exclusively upon racially oppressed groups, this session 'turns the gaze inward' and examines how the boundaries of 'race' and power make visible how whiteness functions as historical and social constructions. By placing the construction of the unmarked, apparently autonomous, white/Western self centre-stage - to be investigated, analysed, punctured and probed - we problematise privilege as well as oppression.
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Beyond Master and Slave:Modernity's Chinese Connection or Chinese-ness's Modern Connection Chinese culture's encounter with modernity has been typically interpreted either as anathema or panacea. The mythified interpretations of this encounter all originate from that founding myth: that Chinese culture is dated and western culture destined to rule. The postcolonialist effort to de-colonize nevertheless seems to have left intact this myth, what Johannes Fabian calls temporal "non-coevalness," which denies the possibility of what I would call the "revitalizability" of indigenous cultures that have been sidelined into the position of the other by (Western) modernity, and ensures the eventual wholesale Westernization. While the overrated strategy of mimicry produces at best "re-localization" of Western cultural influences, there exists yet another alternative that has been aiming at a "revitalization" of indigenous cultures. The two processes appearing to coincide, the former simply carries on the colonialist project under the optimistic guise of the ! "global/local" dialogic whereas the latter indeed strives toward a true vindication of "coevalness." Organiser: The Cultural Violence of Globalization in East Asia Symmetrical to the coming into being of a great European economic body in 1990s, the last decade also witnessed a growing integration of the East Asian economy into the global market. This session focuses on the cultural violence that economic globalization wields in East Asia. Such a close examination of the disruptive dynamos of globalization is significant not only in challenging the rhetoric of progress promoted by multinational corporations but also for further re-mapping a global future. To think through drastic changes entailed by globalization, we argue that the following two questions will be of great importance. What are some modes of violence, brought about by globalization, that are decisive in reshaping East Asian cultural landscapes including identity formation, geographical imaginations and the recognition of the Other? What could we say about the effects of violence on the contemporary cultural history of East Asia? Studies on such cultural forms as popular discourses, commercial films and advertisements will be discussed in this panel. Organiser: Impact of Globalization on Language and Culture Sessions Globalization leaves no stone unturned. As current globalization requires comprehensive transformation of a society, its impact on language and culture can be detected in every facet of life. The global economy has been influencing traditional values and ways of thinking for a long time. The concept of the global village has changed the outlook of future society. It is our urgent task to scrutinize globalization process in light of what it actually entails, who is pushing it, for whom, what constitutes globalization, or whose values we are advocating. It appears that mainstream cultures may remain dominant; but many fear that the remaining cultures might be marginalized in the end. For many nations, globalization is equated with North Americanization, which has been proceeding at the expense of losing regional culture and identity among young people. Are regional languages and cultures 'sustainable' against such onslaught of globalization? http://buna.yorku.ca/global/crossroads_abs.html
Organiser: Sport, Globalisation & Corporate Nationalisms Arguably sport, as one of the most universal aspects of popular culture, serves as an important site for debates about globalisation, culture and nationhood (Miller, Lawrence, McKay & Rowe, 2001). The combination of nationalisms, masculinisms and commercialisms associated with sport have solidified its status as cultural practice, process and commodity. Moreover, the compelling tradition, imagery, drama and emotion embodied in sport make it a powerful vehicle for transnational corporate interests. An important series of questions arises from this situation: (1) How do transnational corporations use sport to negotiate between the global and the local? (2) What features of the postmodern nation-state serve to both facilitate and resist particular forms of corporate nationalism? (3) How are particular identities (gender, racial, sexual, indigenous) enabled and constrained, empowered and exploited through global sport. Papers are invited which address any of the above questions and/or those broadly linked to globalisation, consumer culture, advertising and the politics of identity. Organiser: |
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High and Low, Art and Mass Culture Creativity and the Creative Industries Within both the cultural policies of national governments and accounts of economic and cultural change generated from within the academy, the so-called ‘creative industries’ have gained a new prominence. The session takes the increasing salience of these industries as its starting point. We are interested in papers that explore the new configuration of what used to be called the media and cultural industries as ‘creative’ enterprises and their links to the expanded currency of ideas of creativity within cultural policy and organizational reform. Papers that explore the social make-up of these worlds of work, their informal occupational cultures and the wider social positioning of practitioners employed in these industries are also particularly invited. Papers that bring an historical focus to the study of ‘creative industries’ would be welcomed, as would papers that offer a comparative analysis of these industries, including their positioning within different national cultural policy programmes. Organisers: |
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This session will investigate the kinds of subject positions created by transnational discourses that are morally-charged. We will focus on three sets of morally-charged transnational discourses: erotics and sexuality; human rights and the politics of compassionate humanitarianism; and religious fundamentalism. Specific topics covered will include the transnational circulation of representations of erotics and intimacy and their attendant discourses of desire, morality, and contagion; the relationship between sexuality and neoliberal subjectivity; constructions of human rights and humanitarianism and ideas of citizenship and solidarity; and discursive practices of religious fundamentalism and their implications for notions of embodied agency. By focusing on the production and circulation of these discourses in specific social and historical contexts, we will examine how they might have participated in the creation of new forms of identity and community in the contemporary world. Organiser: Technologies of the Self in Contemporary (Business) Management Business management has become culturally sensitive and explicitly concerned with integrating so-called cultural values in corporate organisation and personnel management. Employees are asked to become self-managing and engage in continuous learning. The session will address the role of consultants and personnel management in the promotion of self-technologies in the workplace. In Crossroads, Birmingham 2000, the session Contemporary Cultural Formations of Corporate Business brought fruitful debate on the micropolitics of contemporary corporate management. The organiser hopes that we at the session in Tampere 2002 can continue this debate. Organiser: Trade Diasporas and Identity Construction We propose a session on trade diasporas of modern and post-modern genesis, focusing upon the founding, evolution and present social structure of transnational communities. These could be diasporas primarily of settlement or of sojourn, but actuated principally in pursuit of work or trade. We are interested in the question of mutual perceptions and reciprocal attitudes between such communities and their host societies, and the extent to which these have been used by the former to construct, adapt and/or renegotiate a collective identity strategically appropriate to the new conditions. To this end, we propose enquiries upon a dual axis: the axis of ethnic cohesiveness- mediated through markers such as education, clubs, shops and cultural/sporting links used to maintain continued identification with the old country; and the axis of hybridity- marked by language learning, marrying out, social openess to and acceptance by the society of adoption. Organisers: Unsettled Boundaries: Welfare and the Contested Construction of Subjects, States and Spaces Cultural Studies' engagement with
'policy' has primarily focused on cultural Organiser: Women and the Politics of Activism in the Post-Quake Era in Turkey In the aftermath of the devastating Marmara earthquake in 1999, the “tent communities” added a new dimension to the existing inequalities among women in Turkey. The emotional and material trauma informed new ways of thinking, responding, and acting among the women. This session explores the formation of meaning from the perspectives of the women living in the tent-communities. How do women articulate themselves in this changing environment? How do they deal with difficulties of daily life? How do they use pre-existing webs of mutual support to deal with these difficulties and to ameliorate the social conditions? What is the nature of the collective actions taken by them? How did they contribute to the transformation of the feminist politics, and what role did media play in this transformation? In the larger frame, this session is an effort to challenge dominant discourses of “feminism” in the context of Turkey. Organisers: Müge Ýplikci-Çakýr |
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Cultural Representations of Age and the Life-Course Sessions Age has become an increasingly important basis for social categorization. The transition to the post-industrial society has led to a constant reconceptualization of the individual life-course. There are varying definitions of life-phases as well as perceptions about what is (in)appropriate at a given age. This session focuses on representations of age and the life-course as changing cultural and social phenomena, which are constantly defined in various forms of media, literature, education etc. These constructions of age are gendered as well as racialized and culture-specific, and they always need to be carefully historically and socially contextualized. Presentations concerning the manifold conceptualizations and representations of age, life-phases and the life-course in general and of childhood, youth, adulthood, middle-age or old age as well as transitions between these are welcomed in the session.
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In recent years there has been a growing interest in how social life is mediated by a diversity of 'artefactual domains' (D. Miller). In addition to anthropology, important contributions have been made by, among others, social studies of science and technology. Acknowledging the plurality of ways in which objects matter implies a move away from studying them simply as symbols. Ethnographic research on everyday life with artefacts - how they are acquired, used, taken care of, stored, and in the end, abandoned - reveals how the inherently plural and mute world of objects is intertwined with representations but not reducible to them. Moreover, in contemporary western 'waste economies' (H. Arendt), the questions of disposal and recycling have become increasingly topical, further accentuating the importance of discussing the ways in which material, collective and personal biographies become entangled. Both case studies and theoretical papers are welcome to this interdisciplinary session.
Organiser: The Joint Session for Material Culture Studies and Cultural Studies on the Technology in Use Organisers: Ilkka Arminen and Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen |
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Audiovisual images in cultures of historical memory: the case of war as "modernist event" Recent theoretical and analytical work in film and media studies has stressed the contribution of cinema and television to the formation of cultural memories with regard to historical events and their aftermath. Hayden White´s concept of the "modernist event" refers to a contemporary history which is thoroughly archived in (audio)visual images, while at the same time debates about meanings and narrativizations of "what happened" can hardly be set at rest. The paradigmatic status of war as modernist event is accompanied by notions of war as media event, highlighting live coverage as well as TV documentaries and cinematic reconstructions of the past as mass-cultural "lieux de mémoire". Traumatic retroactivity, prosthetic memory, media geopolitics or fictional revision of national history are among the research paradigms in circulation. This panel will focus on the experience and remembrance of war in audiovisual images, ranging from global inf! ormati on networks and TV historiography to Hollywood movies and cinematic essays. Organiser: This panel explores some of the issues relating to the current centrality given to notions of representation within cultural and media studies. The notion that the media shape the social by constructing its meaning through representation is an established textbook argument throughout the field. This centrality given to meaning/signification/representation, however, is in urgent need of re-assessment. The panel questions and contextualises this emphasis of representation in the context of the structuralist legacy of semiotic approaches to the relationship between language and reality and explores alternative approaches to culture, the body and the media and their implications for research and teaching in the field. Organiser: Media Convergence: Cultural Effects of Mediatisation and Digitization (informationalisation) Timely debates on new media, information technologies, networked communication and hybrid cultures have focused on the challenges of 'electronic' and 'digital culture' that effect new dimensions of human-machine-interaction and connectivity, of density and complexity. Under the sign of the keywords mediatisation, digitisation and globalisation that are commonly favored in media and cultural studies we try to understand how contemporary cultural, social and aesthetic practices depend on computers and how society also shapes the media that are used. While superficial considerations in both fields widely agree that 'the triumph of simulation' causes instability and even crisis in the representational systems at large (most prominently in visual representation), differently transdisciplinary approaches suggest a perspective of contextualization and reflexivity to scrutinize knowledge production and its structures in the light of the dialectic of continuity and difference, of stagnation and flow. Where cross-relations and transformations are issues that cross the borders between media and cultural studies, questions of convergence, multidimensionality and multimodality and certainly the variety of interplay, intermediality and interactivity demand a closer examination of the emergence of more complex and paradoxical phenomena. We like to discuss the achievement of such discursive dialogues that would be effective in mediating and encouraging critical standpoints from within technologisation. Their focusing on interconnections between power and aesthetics promise methodological sharing in developing critical views on the resulting shifts from communication to commutation. Organisers: Yvonne Spielmann Media Professionals and Media Production Media globalisation and the restructuring of media ownership have very real implications for media audiences, media content, media organizations and the day-to-day working lives of media professionals. In spite of the recent dominance within media and cultural studies on reception and textual analysis there is also a long-standing research tradition of investigating the culture of media organizations and the activities, experiences and ideologies of media professionals. Research that has media production as its focus has the potential to reveal much about the experiences of media professionals, the constraints within which they operate and the intended meanings that they encode into media texts. Following on from our Session entitled 'Forces Shaping Content' held at the Birmingham Crossroads Conference in 2000, we invite papers from scholars who have the media professional as their research focus. We will consider submissions from a wide range of media genres. Organisers: Recent tendencies towards mediatisation of culture raise questions concerning audiences and emotions. To explore ways of conceptualising emotions in the encounters between mediatexts and their audiences, this session will focus on the following questions: How are emotions constructed, experienced and embodied in mediatexts and their reception? How are gender, ethnicity and sexuality articulated in the contextual expressions of emotions? Papers submitted to this session may discuss these questions from various points of views. We welcome papers from different disciplinary fields, looking forward to lively discussions on representations, genres and cultural practices, in the context of, for example, drama series, soap opera, fan culture or violence. Organisers: Tuija Modinos In this session we invite papers discussing new forms of television texts exemplified in the emergence of the so-called "reality-tv" and game shows. We would like to open up discussions on popularised intimacies, the transmuted definition(s) of public and private spheres, the representation of neo-liberal values through these new cultural forms, the constructions of various televisual identities and of a new star system. Moreover, we would like to keep in mind the significance of intertextuality in media texts. Papers from different countries focusing on the "reality TV" with an interdisciplinary perspective are welcome.
Organisers: Producing Meaning: From Media Production to Media Texts This session covers a wide range of issues of the media and the media production. The session raises questions on representation of identity, gender and cultural hierarchies in media texts. Papers analyse presuppositions on media production, articulations between sexuality and terrorism and how gender is portrayed in media texts. Organiser: Representations of Strong Women in Film and Tv-fiction This session will examine representations of strong, active and violent heroines in film and tv-fictions. Heroine in this context is not merely the female lead role, but a heroine with classic 'masculine' attributes such as violent behavior, use of weapons, heroic action. How shall we understand such a figure: Is she a gender bender, a gender cross dresser or a feministic bitch? What is her psychological 'function' in the plot? What 'story' does she tell? And what audiences does she appeal to? Papers are invited that discuss questions of narrative and visual pleasure, psychology, identification, genre. Focus may be on theory, textual analysis or historical perspective. A variety of formats and genres are welcome: mainstream Hollywood movies, lowbudget films and tv-series, as well as genres such as the action movie (especially Hong Kong and U.S.), drama, wip-films, rape-revenge films, westerns, adventure films.
Organiser: Theorizing the Media's "place" in Globalization Sessions One of the more undertheorized questions in the burgeoning studies of globalization's deterritorializing effects is how the mass media work both to disembed cultural practices from bounded localities, and to reembed place in space - even to create new imaginaries of community. The question poses a challenge to cultural studies to fill the gap in theorizing the media's "place" in globalization. Studies of globalization thus far have treated the media tangentially, if at all, as an "information" technology - an abstraction that itself serves to "deterritorialize" the media, to sever their link to culture, and overlooks the media's role in mediating and perhaps even remapping the connection between people and places.
Organiser: ‘Wanted Dead or Alive': Media, Terrorism, Nationalism With the initial shock over the terrorist attacks on September 11 receding, the exceptional character of terrorism as historical and political event moves into the foreground. As the vast majority of people only encounter terrorism through the media, the adversarial and symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media warrants renewed attention. Public discourse about terrorism has faced an impasse, often reduced to what Schlesinger calls "a Manichaen mental universe." As the main response to terrorism was phrased in military terms and specifically precluded any form of deeper understanding of the issues involved, cultural studies should contribute alternative understandings of terrorism, providing approaches with more explanatory power regarding this subject. This panel will explore a variety of strategies in the international media coverage of terrorism: The renewal of nationalism, the legitimization of violence, the suppression of dissent, and the creation of different discourses of gender, race and ethnicity. Organiser: |
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Reflexive Media Ethnography in Spaces of Consumption This session brings together insights from reflexive ethnography in anthropology with experiences of media ethnography in spaces of consumption. The session is inspired by the methodological and epistemological issues facing the researchers in an ongoing study of a shopping centre. What constructions of "the field" are involved instudies of media practices and consumption? In what ways do constructions of the field serve to localise and territorialise larger transnational processes and power relations? How can analyses of the ethnographic present be combined with historical methods and concepts of time and change? What are the implications of doing collective ethnography, in terms of ethnographic authority, fieldwork and writing styles, and forms of intertextuality? How are issues of power and difference conceptualised, in terms of gender/class/ethnicity, researcher/informant, local/transnational, tradition/modernity or hegemony/multiplicity? The session invites reflections upon these and other issues concerning processes involved in doing media ethnography in late modernity. Organiser: |
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Collateral Language: Mapping the Discourses of America’s New War This panel will theorize the emergence of new discourses since 9/11. In so doing, panelists will offer short genealogies of particular terms such as “anthrax,” “barbarism,” “terrorism” and “The war on…” and how these phrases have become instantiated as truth regimes in the media and the American public since the bombings of 9/11. Each paper offers a theoretical analysis of the first 30 days of the “New War” and the social and political implications of these discourses as they ripple through U.S. culture (i.e., homeland security, the forcible detainment of over a 1000 Arabs since September and the erosion of civil liberties). Theoretically these papers draw on the insights of poststructuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory and postcolonial theory. Organiser: Community: An Alternative to the Nation? As the now classic formula has it, nations are “imagined communities.” But what is it that makes a nation different from a community? And can community respond to the problems inherent in nationhood? What problems does a notion of community itself entail? Is it necessarily a “better” option than nation? It has been remarked that community is primarily an affiliation of blood, which brings to mind some of the most limiting forms of nationalism. Ideas of community, however, may also include, on the one hand, linguistic and religious affiliations, such as pan-Arabism or the Islamic umma, that transcend national boundaries, or on the other hand, associations of nations, such as the European Community. This panel invites scholars in the humanities and social sciences to evaluate the concept of community and its potential to serve as an alternative to nationalism. Organiser: Dark Nights, White Spaces: Cultural
Imaginations of Northern Landscapes White Nights, Dark Spaces: Cultural
Abstractions of Northern Landscapes Organisers: Samu Pehkonen Indigenous Peoples and Cultures of Resistance Indigenous peoples in countries and regions such as Australia, North America, New Zealand and Scandinavia have, for centuries, used different forms and strategies of resistance in struggles with their colonial and settler populations. Since this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, this session will explore some of the myriad forms of resistance taken by (or 'about') indigenous people, whether subtle or provocative, legal or illegal, cultural or purely political. The session will be broad in scope, and we invite papers from indigenous studies, anthropology, sociology, history and geography. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the construction of identity through resistance and activitivism. Other papers welcomed may address questions such as how have resistance movements changed over time? How have people made use of space, place and scale? How have the changes brought about by an increasingly 'globalized' world changed indigenous resistance strategies? Organisers: Johanna Perheentupa Gendered Dimension of Nationalism The objective of this session should be the examination of the gendered character of nation-state formation from a theoretical perspective. The main questions are: In which ways does gender play a significant role in the formation of nation-state? Which symbols and icons making reference to "female" are used in the formation of nation-state? How are women represented in the nationalist discourse? Through which ways does national citizenship acquire a masculinist character? Organiser: Historical and Modern Aspects of Russian Imperial Policy in Central Asia, Siberia and Far East Russia's conquering of vast territories of Siberia, Far East and Central Asia began since 17th century. At first the Tsarist and then the Soviet administration tried to change these territories in accordance with Russian imperial conception of creating a strong superpower. Russian and Soviet authorities tried different programmes and plans for economical, cultural, social and political reorganization of these territories; some of them failed and some gave quite unexpectable results. In a course of time became evident that the "new" territories of the Empire has a certain impact on the Russian society as well. Rethinking of recent historical past can help us to reconstruct and rewrite whole pages in the history of the big empires such as Russia. During the work of our panel we will discuss different aspects of Russian/Soviet imperial policy in past and present.
Organiser: Ideology and Its Discontents: Between Textuality and Zionism. For Benedict Anderson, the nation is an "imagined community" which derives its sense of its own unity as it represents, and hereby constructs, itself in various textual guises (1986 [1983]). Like all nationalisms, Zionism was also constituted as a discursive formation whose hegemonic self-representation elides traces of the ideological conflicts which accompanied its genesis. We seek to revisit textual sites of such conflict and its erasure, whether occasioned by considerations of sameness and difference projected beyond the boundaries of the nation (ideological positionings vis-a-vis other cultures, for instance) or with respect to considerations of internal sameness and difference (e.g., ethnic or gender differences in the construction of the "national subject"). We welcome contributions which similarly seek to restore plurality to the historiographic record of the Zionist past, thus promoting the imagination of a multiplicity of future options loosened from the coercive colonial nexus of classic Zionism. Organisers: Neve Gordon Multiculturalism in Nation-State Almost all so-called nation-states have inhabitants belonging to more than one nation living in their territories. In addition to older national minorities, international migration has contributed to the diversification of the ethnic composition of contemporary societies during the last decades. Thus all nation-states can be regarded as multicultural societies. Some of them do apply multiculturalism as a policy strategy, some of them do not. The aim of this session is to discuss the possibilities and problems of the politics of multiculturalism in different countries. For instance, do traditional nationalist conceptions have an influence on current migration and minority politics/policies? To what extent are multiculturalist ideas/ideals realised in these countries? Are cultural/ethnic minorities able to have an impact on their position in the society as well as on social matters in general? Both theoretical and empirical papers are encouraged to be presented in this session. Organisers: Outi Lepola
Seija Tuulentie Nation, Community and the Construction of Place in Contemporary Theatre Both 'community' and 'nation' even, or especially in, times of 'space-time compression' (Harvey 1989) are concepts that are indissolubly tied to representations of place. This panel seeks to discuss how issues of place are explored in contemporary theatrical performance. Seemingly unmediated, the audience experiences place as tangible and 'real' in the theatre and thus the staging of place is far more than merely the background to theatrical action. How is place constructed in plays dealing with issues of community and nation and how is the actual construction of the performance space linked to the discussion of these issues in the plays? How are contested ideas about community and nation presented in a theatrical framework? What role does the theatre both as an institution and as an art form have in the cultural production of place? And which role does the localisation of plays, playwrights/companies and performance spaces play in a more general cultural discussion of nation and community? Organiser: Nationhood and Nationalism - The Case of Israel Israel came into being in 1948 with a population of about 806,000. Since then this population has grown eight-fold, reacing 6,400,000 by May 2001, out of which 1,200,000 are Arabs. For all purposes and intents Israel is a bi-national State, wherein the minority group - the Arabs - constitutes about 20%. It is bound to reach 25% according to the official forecast within the forthcoming generation. Israel is defined by both social and political scientists as a multi-cleavage society, riven by a multitude of tensions. As put by Prof. Michael Weltzer, " This is a society which is segmented in more aspects and deeper ways than any other society I know in the Western world. The most difficult and complicated of the cleavages is the religious-national cleavage, pitting Jewish and Arab citizens of the same State against each other. The Session deals with this division and the debate over democracy, nationalism and nationhood raging in Israel. It deals with the problem how should Israel be defined with regard to the democracy-ethnic affiliation nexus. It dwells on the debate raging in this respect between those presenting it as a "consociational democracy," those who consider it to be a liberal democracy, and those who define it as an "ethnic democracy", that balances the ethnic and democratic components in its dealings with its Arab-Palestinian citizens. Moreover, the Session also deals with the question how could Arab Nationalism blend with Israeli citizenship and how can civil society blend two national groups. Organiser: |
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New Media and Information Technology Agency, Differences and New Technologies The session examines the interconnection of agency and new information and communication technologies/media in the context of people's everyday life practices and interpretations. It brings together studies of various groups ranging, for example, from mobile phone users and rural and local information society developers to disabled children. It aims to articulate the social differences (e.g. locality, gender, age) that organise the use and the development of the new technologies and the technology related practices. Various social differences intertwine with one and another in people's practices and the session explores how the intertwining differences shape the agency related to new technologies. It presents perspectives and interpretations of various groups of people to discuss the social and cultural construction of agency in the technically mediated society.
Organisers: Marja Vehviläinen Communication & Community Sessions Internet studies has had a strong focus on virtual communities and forms of online communications for well over a decade. Meanwhile, community has become something of an over-arching term that is used of commercial Web sites, mailing lists and chats alike, to the degree that it has seemed to loose its analytical specificity.
Organiser: Cultural Studies on the Technology in Use Cultural studies can play a crucial role in illuminating the ways in which people use and interact with technology. Technologies offer diverse possibilities for action and afford to ranges of meanings. Customers and users of technology follow their cultural intuition and models while acting upon or making use of technologies. The intended and actual uses of technology may consequently vary. The critical role of cultural studies may contribute to the design process, specify the requirements for the information systems, and assess the technology visions. Organiser: The Joint Session for Material Culture Studies and Cultural Studies on the Technology in Use Organisers: Ilkka Arminen and Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen Doing Cultural Studies in Cyberspace Considerations of communication technologies in modern cultures have been instrumental in rise and development of Cultural Studies. Thus far, however, the scholarly response within Cultural Studies to analyzing Internet technologies has not been as strong or systematic as with (for example) television. Although a great deal of Internet- focused research has been multidisciplinary, a Cultural Studies approach has really not been achieved despite the fact that a recent wave of critical work aimed at demystifying the role of capitalism in controlling innovation, distribution, and discourse in regards to new media technologies can perhaps be seen as a beginning. What does Cultural Studies have to say (and to do) regarding the growing presence of Internet technologies in the everyday lives of many people in communities around the world? Papers that explore the contextualities and contingencies of Internet use and those that explore the role of Cultural Studies in rearticulating 'cyberculture studies' or 'cyberspace' in general are invited for participation in this panel. Organiser: How Can one Face an Interface? Art, Science, Cultural Studies, and the Question of Experience How to analyse interactive works, such as cd-roms or media art installations, when experience of their uses are characterised by a simultaneity of audio, visuality, tactility, narrativity and sensations that emerge from multiple choices? This panel does not attempt to reach an overall methodology, but instead looks at the cultural experience of new media from interdisclipinary angles. How do computer science, art history, design theory, and cultural studies enable research that provides understanding to how users "face" and experience interactive works and how their interfaces address subjects as users? Papers in the session cover examples of recent projects and products of new media culture, ranging from installations to "cultural software", and from Internet projects to cd-roms. Both in terms of methodologies and ontologies, each paper examines the difficulties of interdisciplinarity in trying to understand how practices of "making interactive projects" relate with hard sciences and design theories that have embedded conceptions of interactivity and use to software and hardware, and how cultural studies might or might not be able to cope with at first seemingly distant disciplines. Organiser: Internet Domestication Across Cultures As the Internet rapidly emerges as a significant nascent mass medium, its social, economic, political and cultural relevance have recently become a fruitful area of study. This session invites contributions from researchers who have studied how individual users and households creatively appropriate, domesticate and integrate the Internet into the practices and relationships constituting everyday life. The goal is to examine the meanings, values and functions that users inhabiting diverse cultural contexts ascribe to the Internet. We would like to bring together qualitative accounts of user experiences from around the world so that we could reflect on the multiple emerging definitions of the Internet as a communication medium. Practices and relationships to be considered may include, but are not limited to: consumption, education, work, parenting, entertainment, political participation, community building, gender, etc. Organisers: Katie Ward Maria Bakardjieva (New) Technologies - (New) Methodologies? ICT Consumption and Everyday Practice Arguably, we live in increasingly mobile societies. Communities are simultaneously (re)constituted in on- and off-line environments. The convergence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenges our ways of experiencing everyday life. This session focuses on various aspects of the cultural, political and socio-economic relationship between (new) ICTs and society, aiming to evaluate and develop qualitative, ethnographic methodological approaches towards (new) ICT research. The questions at the core of this session are: what would be the most appropriate methods for researching (new), convergent and changing ICTs? What does research practice look like? What are the various approaches being used? What can ethnographically informed research tell us about the nature of (new) ICTs? New ICTs - new ethnographic avenues? Aimed as a session with reference to the 'field', findings based on fieldwork experiences are invited. Accepted papers so far include work on ICTs in the home/workplace, the convergence of online and offline user groups, and ICTs in peripheral communities. Organiser: New Theoretical Approaches to the Self in Cyber-Culture This panel explores issues and arguments that have polarized studies of new media technologies over the turn of the millennium. It draws on inter-disciplinary research in media and communication studies, internet research and cultural studies. We are concerned to explore issues of cyber-subjectivity, taking as our starting point a re-examination of the connections between the virtual and substantial self. Understanding that the virtual self can be released from separate categorization and regarded instead as both less and more than body, text, or narrative, opens the way to re-examine where the self ‘ends’ and ‘begins’ in an informational world. This raises critical, epistemological and ethical issues. We invite panellists who can contribute in this area. Accepted papers include work on metaphor, narrative identity, and research ethics. Organiser: Youth, Media and Communication Technologies sessions Media and communication technologies are an
organic part of the everyday lives of ever younger people. The young people of
today live in a multimedial world, where they pick out things they perceive as
important from a flood of information. Alongside mobile communication, the
Internet has become a central medium that enables children and youth to engage
in versatile content production and independent creation of culture. Children
and young people are a group with their own usage cultures and communication
patterns that differ from those of adults. What kinds of communication cultures
do young people have? What types of new communities emerge through the various Organisers: Pirjo Rautiainen |
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Author ©: Intellectual Property and Contemporary Authorship At the intersection of aesthetic authorship and legal rights ownership lies a fertile knot of ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics, cultural politics and techno-econimics. This session aims to engage with the fissures, overlaps, and ambiguities of authorship in contemporary, globalised economic and technological environments. Paper should engage with authorship/ownership in music, literature, or the visual arts through various cultural mediations: legal structures, technology, globalisation processes, identitarian politics, stances of anonymity and resistance, etc. Key issues will concern collaborative/multiple authorship, author/rights-owner divergence, the ethics and rhetoric of piracy, passivity/activity in consumption, reception of intellectual property discourse in the popular media, among others. The goal for this session to create an environment for exchange and lively debate on authorship the practical realities of intellectual and artistic property in our global moment and to open up this compelling area to interdisciplinary inquiry.
Organiser: Consolidation. New Trend(s) in Cultural Studies & Popular Media Research in popular culture has come at a moment of consolidation: different strands of theory and research are articulated together in ways that would have been unimaginable before. This panel looks at diverse forms of popular culture (film, television, pop music, visual arts, digital media), both with regard to the specificity of the texts and audience practices they are situated in and with regard to how they address issues that clearly supersede media and generic boundaries. These issues include: social change, feminism, queer studies. The panel specifically focuses on how these changes have taken shape in perhaps different ways then was expected three decades ago. By taking different strands together, we can see how issues put on the agenda by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have been given, often unexpected, new contents by both traditional and new media, forcing cultural studies scholars to realize that we need to constantly re-stake the terrain in dialogue with the popular media. Organisers: Is Nothing Sacred?: Critical Analysis of the Use of "Religion" in North American Popular Culture Among scholars of religious studies, there is no consensus about what is meant by the term "religion." Issues of definition are complicated further when "religion" is contrasted with "culture." Recent work in religious studies suggests that the academic study of religion should be appropriated by cultural studies. Opponents of this takeover argue that important qualities of "the spiritual" or "the sacred" would be lost if all that has heretofore been understood as religion were to be subsumed within the secular realm of culture. The panel will participate in this discussion by showing how specific religious ideas, images and practices function as structuring principles within particular aspects of North American popular culture. The boundary between "the secular" and "the religious" will be illuminated as a vexed and ever-shifting variant within discursive and representational practice. Organiser: Planned Exits. Suicide Concepts in Contemporary Fiction Fairy tales tend to end
optimistically: "...And they lived happily ever after". Forever, about
500 years, or the average length of a human life? German fairy tales end on a
slightly different note, since death gets to be mentioned as the ultimate
option: "...Und sie lebten glücklich bis an ihr Ende." So did they
die as happily as they lived? Or was their life happy despite the inevitable?
What if they lived miserably ever after - would they eventually want to die much
earlier then "ever after"? Organisers: Dr. Donna Reiner Popular Culture and Cultural Production This session outlines current expanding discussions on the images, representations, genres, politics, high/low distinctions as well as production of popular culture. Papers argue the complex strategies through which popular culture is embedded in the everyday practices and politics. Thematizations include ideas from new right politics to film analysis. Organiser: During the years of cultural resistance to
Communist ideology in the countries of FSU and in EE, rock music turned out to
be one of the most progressive modernizing art forms of the period. It found
itself at the forefront of cultural and ideological straggle, became a conduit
of liberal "Western" ideas. Organiser: |
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This session deals with the theme of professioning in cultural frames. Expertise is becoming dominating in every sphere of life; on the other hand, professional field is becoming dispersed in the process of the expansion. The interesting question is, how professions are produced in cultural frames. The field of professions, the patterns of professioning and the position of professions are produced and reproduced at the crossroads of varied cultural frames. Global processes, national traditions, organisational patterns and occupational work modes produce the particular culture of professioning. The cultural production of professions does not follow one model: the diversity of the field is based on combinations of traditions and transitional processes. The theme can be analysed applying a wide variety of theoretical approaches, perspectives ranging from organisational studies to theoretical constructions of cultural studies, and it can be focused on the topics dealing with the relations of culture and professions: professions in cultural transition, professional culture or professions and organisational culture. Organisers: Susan Eriksson |
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Psychological Cultural Studies Critical Psychology and Cultural Studies Critical psychology provides the basis of what might profitably an address to subjectivity for cultural theory and analysis. Cultural studies makes frequent reference to the importance of subjectivity but often lacks a theoretical framework to address the production of diverse subjectivities within specific cultural locations and practices. This session aims to explore how the psychological might figure within cultural studies by making reference to the growing body of work which has come to be known as critical psychology. Work within this tradition encompasses discursive, post-structuralist and psycho-analytic perspectives, but all strive for an understanding of the cultural production of forms of being a subject. Organiser: The Interpellation of Experience Sessions Rather than conceiving of subjective experience as foundational, the papers in this session will explore approaches to subjectivity which cast experience in terms of social processes, seeing it as a set of relations to oneself and to others, made possible by technology, culture and material conditions. Some of the questions introduced by this kind of shift include: whether subjective experience can be anything other than a product or by-product of social/cultural relations; whether experience can exceed its regulation practices; whether interiority can be a useful starting point for understanding culture; how the realm of experience relates to different forms of political governmentality; and what is subjective experience under conditions of the biotechnological reorganization of our corporeality. Organisers: Dimitris Papadopoulos |
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Diasporic Visuality and Its Modernity: The Case of Taiwan Auteur Tsai Ming-liang This session is devoted to the Malaysia-born filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’amour, The Hole), who has contributed his own variety of modernist sensibility to the visual experience in Taiwan. Different from most other directors there making films à la French New Wave, Tsai proceeds with his very poignant kind of minimalism (few dialogs and little soundtrack), and his only theme is pain (of all kinds: isolation, love, illnesses, and death). In the political sense, Tsai is here rehashing his diasporic experience which has caused him to paint Taipei into a biblical vision, overwhelmed by desolation as well as the sublime. But what gets portrayed visually is also the status of modernity in Taiwan: in particular, the kind of modernity that can only be approached through film, not to mention the fate of this postcolonial island state in terms of intra-Asia diaspora. Organiser: Looking into Visual Culture: Issues of Women and Gender Looking into Visual Culture: Issues of Women and Gender will bring together artists, scholars and activists who are exploring feminist practices across disciplines. Through our panel we will engage culturally situated visual production and representation in order to raise questions of audience, artistic freedom, methods of distribution, political and aesthetic strategies, methodological and pedagogical frameworks and histories of exclusion, marginalization and stigmatization. Presentations will pay special attention to women and gender in visual materials that include film, video and photography as well as traditional arts. Through the panel-presentations we intend to examine a wide range of topics such as: community ethos and identity in African American communities; agency and resistance in visual cultural production; female resistance in film; visual representations (historical and fictional) of witches (from adult and children?s literature to fairytales); the intersection of women?s censorship and criminalization; and the institutional practices that support interdisciplinary feminist inquiry and cultural critique within university settings. Organiser: Visual Culture Studies Sessions Visual culture studies is a new interdisciplinary field for the study of the cultural construction of visual experience in visual arts, media, representations, and everyday life. This session will examine theoretical frameworks of visual studies and will scrutinize the relation of the latter to cultural studies, art history, anthropology, museum studies, postcolonial studies, film studies, and literary theory. It will consider the following questions: What is the social advocacy of the category of art? Is visual studies an 'appropriate' expansion of art history or is it something independent of art history and most appropriate for studying technologies of vision related to the digital and virtual era? What is the relation between the postmodern and the 'visual turn'? What is the relevance of visual culture to the study of historical art? What are the implications of establishing a new field of research for college and university curriculum and teaching?
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Arctic Youth Research - Challenges and Visions Under the theme of Youth Culture the session is
seeking the broad cultural understanding of the living conditions and life
situations of the young people in northern parts of the globe. Arctic Youth
Research can be seen as an umbrella venture to grasp the northern life
experiences of the youth and through comparative discussions of research
findings develop a better and comprehensive cultural understanding of the old
and new, traditional, modern, post and late modern walks of life of the rising
generations in the north. One point of view is the setting of local conditions
and emerging globalisation, and the other is the geographical setting of
centre-periphery that may have a Organisers: Veli-Matti Ulvinen Youth Development in Underdeveloped Countries Underdeveloped countries have been characterised with a culture of not "taking care of the seed" and most of all not providing an enabling environment where "the seed can grow". Youth development is far from being one of the priority areas that governments put on their agendas, and even if they are, programmes intended for the youths only look glamorous on paper...the fruits not yielded. This leads to wasting of the vast potential we have in the youths and they are not given a chance to explore their potentialities. What institutional capacities do we have to unveil and build in order to tap this wasting potential? What role does poverty play? What other measures do we have to employ to safeguard this generation? Organiser: |