[eccr] CFP: CACS--CULTUREPOLES: City Spaces, Urban Politics & Metropolitan Theory

>Please circulate widely
>
>CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS
>Deadline: October 20th 2003
>
>CULTUREPOLES:
>City Spaces, Urban Politics & Metropolitan Theory
>
>Canadian Association of Cultural Studies
>February 13-15, 2004
>Hamilton, Ontario
>
>Cultural Studies has, as Colin Sparks remarked twenty-five years ago, been
>constituted out of a "veritable rag bag" of competing ideas. Yet the
>leitmotifs of the field (commodification, reproduction, hegemony, mass
>culture, popular culture, and the culture industry) are suggestive of a
>shared genealogy in the historical transition from the manufacturing
>centre to the suburbanized spatialities of consumer society. In this
>respect, North American and European cultural studies can be viewed as a
>project almost coterminous with the shifting structure of the first-world
>capitalist city.
>
>In the era of mechanical reproduction, the linkage between capital,
>population and cultural production seemed unproblematic: New York, London,
>Tokyo, Shanghai and Paris were calculated as the five largest cities in
>the world. The diffusion of cultural goods from metropolitan to the
>periphery was a secondary question most often answered in terms of
>infrastructural capacity. Current economic, technological and demographic
>tendencies undermine this perceived position of the city as
>supra/structural template for mapping the production and consumption of
>social meaning. The concept of the "culturepole" seeks to facilitate a
>rethinking of this oft naturalized relation between cultural studies and
>the first-world capitalist city.
>
>In this context, Culturepoles, the 2004 conference of the Canadian
>Association of Cultural Studies, seeks to critically engage with questions
>of the location of culture and cultural studies through a conscious
>revisiting of the city as a site for the production of theory,
>dominant/resistant cultural practices, and as the location of radical
>politics. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
>
>- metropolitan theory
>- ethnicity, race and the city
>- the country, the city and the suburb
>- cultural practices in and against the city
>- urban activisms
>- global cultural studies
>- urban soundscapes and visualscapes
>- regional cultural studies
>- concentrations of cultural capital/production
>- the politics of infrastructure
>
>Papers that fall outside of the conference theme, but which deal with
>topics in cultural studies, will also be considered. We are especially
>interested in sessions organized by urban activists, artists and cultural
>workers, as well as reports from research groups and non-governmental
>organizations that deal with the issues outline above.
>
>Abstracts of no more than 250 words (preferably in e-mail form) should be
>submitted before October 20th to (cacs /at/ mcmaster.ca) or mailed to the address
>below. All presenters must be members in good standing of the Canadian
>Association of Cultural Studies prior to the beginning of the conference.
>(Update information on membership will be circulated shortly).
>
>Please include the following information at the top of your submission:
>name, email, mailing address, phone number, and institutional affiliation
>(if applicable). Please also indicate on the abstract any A/V
>requirements. Presenters will have access to TV/VCR units and data
>projectors (for the latter, participants must provide their own lap top
>computers; there will be no live Internet access during the sessions). If
>there is sufficient demand, we will endeavour to provide equipment to play
>CDs as well.
>
>The conference will be held in conjunction with the opening events of
>"Future Cities," a major international art exhibit and speakers series
>organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) over the course of 2004.
>The AGH has invited artists from around to world to present their work as
>part of this exhibition. Invited artists include Andreas Gursky (Germany),
>Thomas Struth (Germany), Stan Douglas (Canada), Catherine Opie (Britain),
>Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba), Bodys Iseek Kingiley (South Africa), Jin Me Joon
>(Canada), Ian Wallace (Canada), Roy Arden (Canada), Yin Xiuzhen (China),
>Iiona Nemeth and Jiri Suruvka (Czech Republic), Pavel Althamer (Poland),
>and others. Four artists will be in residence during the project and will
>produce site-specific pieces based on their experience in Hamilton:
>Eleanor Bond (Canada), Aglai Konrad (Belgium), Edward Burtynsky (Canada)
>and the architectural group M.V.R.D.V (Rotterdam). The event will kick off
>with two roundtables on "Contemporary Visions of Modern Metropolis" and
>"Visual Culture, Global Cities and Urban Identities," which have been
>scheduled so as not to interfere with Culturepoles. See
>http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.on.ca for more information on the AGH.
>
>Both Culturepoles and "Future Cities" plans to invite a number of special
>guests to participate in these discussions. These will be announced as
>soon as they are confirmed.
>
>Canadian Association of Cultural Studies
>c/o Department of English
>McMaster University
>1280 Main Street W.
>Hamilton, ON  L8P 1W3
>Fax: 905-777-8316

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Carpentier Nico (Phd)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University Brussels
Studies on Media, Information & Telecommunication (SMIT)
Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSO)
Office: C0.05
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.30
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.28.61
E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
W1: http://smit.vub.ac.be/
W2: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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