[ecrea] ICA Preconference -- Beyond the Brand (sponsored by the Popular Communication Division)

More info to come in the future, but just to whet the proverbial 
appetite for now:


INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION
PRECONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT -- POPULAR COMMUNICATION DIVISION

BEYOND THE BRAND
?http://beyondthebrand2013.wordpress.com/

17 June 2013, 8AM -- 4:30PM
London School of Economics

Organizers: Devon Powers, Drexel University and Melissa Aronczyk, 
Carleton University
?(beyondthebrand2013 /at/ gmail.com)

Keynote Address: Don Slater, London School of Economics

Confirmed Senior Scholar Presentations
Sarah Banet-Weiser, University of Southern California
Aeron Davis, Goldsmiths, University of London
Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario
Matt McAllister, Pennsylvania State University
Liz Moor, Goldsmiths, University of London
Joe Turow, University of Pennsylvania

***

?BEYOND THE BRAND?

A vital shift in contemporary communication is related to the ways in 
which interpersonal and public communication have been (re)located and 
transformed in increasingly promotional contexts. One index of this 
transformation is the ubiquity, polyvalence, and assumptions of 
branding. The "work" of the brand is to act at once as representation 
and object, communication and control, market and media.

As concept, metaphor, technology and communicative logic, brands are 
part popular culture and part commerce, part personal and part 
collective, part rationality and part affect. They appear to be 
everywhere even as they effectively seek to hide their origins.

What resources do scholars have to get "beyond the brand"? How can we 
come up with more effective and trenchant definitions and analytical 
tools to overcome brands' seeming ubiquity, and to defuse the apparent 
power of branding in language and in practice? The goal of this 
preconference is to develop resources and strategies in four thematic 
areas: brands and methods/critique; brands, knowledge, and surveillance; 
brands and communities of resistance (locally and transnationally); and 
brands and industrial/institutional change.