[ecrea] Popular Life of Things / CFP

The Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia 
(Poland) is happy to announce a CFP for an upcoming international 
conference:

“The Popular Life of Things. Material Culture(s) and Popular Processes” 
to be held in Sosnowiec (Poland), 3-4 July 2014



In the preface to Les Mots et les choses (1966), a work on the 
relationship between discourse and things, Michel Foucault observes that 
“the fundamental codes of culture – those governing its language, its 
schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the 
hierarchy of practices – establish for every man (…) the empirical 
orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at 
home.” A predominant cultural code today, popular culture, “offers” 
processes, mechanisms and representations which mediate the experience 
and uses of things, changing the ways we understand / approach 
materiality and engage with objects in our domestic, social and 
professional lives.

Appropriating and rewriting Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: “the social 
life of things”, with which he inspired scholars to take material 
culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and 
revealing area of cultural studies, the conference wishes to address the 
relation between the material and the popular shaped by the post/late 
popular condition. We wish to ask about the impact popular processes, 
such as popularization, customization, serialization etc., have made on 
everyday practices, activities, and habits involving objects as well as 
about if and how this influence contributes to the exchange with(in) 
other cultural domains.

We cordially invite papers that explore the following areas focused on 
(pop)cultural biographies of things: new shapes of long-established 
material traditions as influenced by popular culture, popular 
reinventions of cultural routines, changes in domestic, pastime and 
professional practices, as well as meanings that emerge with the modes 
(accessibility, convenience, user-friendliness) and manners (individual, 
group, autonomous, social) of the popular.

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:



    * representation of objects in popular culture/ popular narratives
    * temporal and spatial trajectories (biographies) of objects in 
popular contexts
    * popular culture and processes of objectification, reification/ 
subjectification of objects
    * commodification, circulation and exchange in the context of the 
popular
    * the fetish and the popular
    * materializing the immaterial
    * objectification of services/ turning  objects or material 
practices into services
    * (im)material objects in video games/ virtual environments
    * (popular) materiality and cultural routines (e.g. reading, 
watching TV, etc. )
    * “tangibility” and “value” of experiences
    * the question of agency and effect
    * authenticity and cultural mimicry
    * uniqueness, exceptionality, rarity
    * the popular, objects and distinction
    * romanticizing material practices
    * gadgets, accessories, trivia, toys
    * creativity (in participation culture) and material culture
    * objects and fandom
    * “popular” bricolage
    * the effort/ labour of collecting and the question of “friction”
    * collecting and serialization
    * history objects (objects as synecdoches of history in popular 
contexts; historical authenticity)



Proposals for presentations, papers and full panels (of approx. 500 
words) followed by a short bio note should be submitted to 
(popularlifeofthings /at/ gmail.com) by 30 March 2014.

All proposals will be peer reviewed. The cost of the conference is 250 
PLN (£50 / €63) and 150 PLN (£30 / €38) for graduate students. 
Registration details will be announced soon. For further queries, please 
contact Dr Karolina Lebek ((karolina.lebek /at/ us.edu.pl)) or Dr Ania 
Malinowska ((anna.malinowska /at/ us.edu.pl)).



The conference’s key note seakers are:

Prof. John Storey (University of Sunderland, UK)

Dr Marcin Sarnek (Univesity of Silesia, Poland)




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