please note the extension to Jan 31, 2011
POPULAR COMMUNICATION ICA PRECONFERENCE - BOSTON 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS
Placing the Aesthetic in Popular Culture: Quality, Value, and Beauty
in Communication and Scholarship
Co-sponsored by the Popular Communication, Philosophy of
Communication, and Visual Communication Divisions
26th May 2011
For
many within the correlate fields of media, cultural, and communication
studies, art, beauty, and aesthetics are highly problematic, heavily
loaded terms. Critical theory posited the evaluative schemas on which
such terms rely as discursively constructed and as frequently laden with
culturally chauvinistic politics, and cultural studies in particular
offered a firm rejection of the notion that the study of culture should
begin with a favorable judgment of the text in question. Yet aesthetics
never went away. Even if unaware, many scholars continued to select
research projects based around judgments of a subject matter's aesthetic
prowess or poverty. More importantly, though, the discourse of
aesthetics, quality, and beauty never went away for audiences and the
media industries, as seen in discussions of "quality television," for
instance, or in the valorization of "independents" and "art house"
production in film, in the debate regarding whether videogames are art
that is currently heading to the US Supreme Court (with the future of
videogame regulation hanging in the balance), or in the continuing
denigration of aesthetic forms associated with marginal groups, such as
certain forms of hip hop.
The aesthetic in popular culture may
even be at the center of significant cultural transformations associated
with new media and the reconfiguration of existing mass media. For
instance, do the commentary and rating options on popular Web 2.0
websites represent a democratization of aesthetic judgment, or even the
creation of a participatory aesthetic "public sphere" based around open
discussion, advice, and support? And to what extent are such
developments paralleled (or exploited) by the rhetoric of natural talent
and the apparent validation of audience opinion on TV shows like the
Idol franchise? We in communication studies may not tackle aesthetics
head on, but it is always there, whether as discourse, rumor, debate, or
control mechanism.
This one-day preconference will approach the
place of aesthetics in popular communication studies. Treating it as a
problematic, not as a given, the preconference will create room for
vigorous debate about the actual and potential place of aesthetics in
our scholarship. The point will not be to find yet more ways to romance
the text, but to interrogate aesthetics and to advance popular
communicative approaches to its observation and analysis. We will ask
where one finds discussions of aesthetics and what they represent, but
also consider possible ways that aesthetics might find its way into our
scholarship in the future.
Individual panels or contributions could address:
The distinction between "quality" media and the mundane
How aesthetics is tied to specific industrial imperatives and economic models
The morality and ethics of aesthetics, and of studying aesthetics
The political uses of aesthetics, and the politics of aesthetics
Aesthetics' relationship with the popular
Singular vs. collaborative constructions of "authorship"
Comparative contexts for the discussion of aesthetics across media
Comparative contexts for the discussion of aesthetics globally
How aesthetics are to be studied methodologically
Format:
The
preconference will be designed to put discussion front and center.
Panelists will be asked to circulate short two-page position papers
beforehand, and will then have approximately five minutes each to
introduce their ideas. Panelists will then be invited to discuss amongst
each other, before opening the discussion, at the half-way point, to
discussion with the room. Thus, while panelist spots will be limited,
this format allows for the entire room to take part actively in the
day's proceedings.
Call:
We invite 500 word abstracts from
those wishing to be panelists to be submitted to Jonathan Gray
((jagray3 /at/ wisc.edu)) by January 31, 2011. Panels will be assembled by the
conference planning committee, with notification to follow in February,
2011. Remember that panelists will only have five minutes to introduce
their ideas, and thus submissions should be tailored to the discursive
format, not to monologic delivery.
