[ecrea] CFP: Cultures of Capitalism: Cultural Studies Association of Australasia 2017

Cultures of Capitalism

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference 2017

December 6-8

Massey University, Wellington Campus

Aotearoa New Zealand

Keynote Speakers: Professor Patricia Hill Collins (University of 
Maryland), Professor Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), 
Professor Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Professor Wendy 
Larner (University of Victoria, Wellington).

Culture is increasingly positioned in economic and political discourse 
as the solution for ailing communities, industries, and cities. In a 
global environment riven by climate change, war, and migrations, we are 
told that communities with the right culture will adapt and sustain 
while others will be left behind. Labour and manufacturing have 
undergone radical shifts due to post-industrialisation, with knowledge 
economy paradigms creating new cultures of work and working identities. 
Culture is also increasingly valourised in urban planning and municipal 
infrastructure as key to revitalising city economies through creativity 
and social participation. Transformations in labour and its value are 
also linked to the reification of racialised, sexualized, and classed 
populations and their management through technologies of capital. How 
labour is valued contributes to an affective economy of precarity and 
risk that is differentially distributed throughout society.

The 2017 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference will 
focus on the work that cultures do in constructing, contesting, and 
constituting capitalism. We seek to critically examine the role of 
culture in both enabling and articulating new capitalist formations. 
While culture has been situated as the opiate through which economic 
dominance is propagated (for instance in the culture industries 
critique), new capitalist formations indicate the multiple and 
heterogeneous ways in which culture/s can mediate contemporary economic 
conditions. In doing so, we seek to return to one of the key concerns of 
early cultural studies: to make sense of the mutually-determining 
relation between culture and its capitalist context. If, following 
Stuart Hall, we understand ‘culture’ as the production of meaning 
through language and representation, what are the modes of communication 
through which capitalism/s are created? How are capitalism/s 
materialised in different spaces? How is it embodied in different 
identities and communities? What is the role of economy in shaping the 
possibilities for culture? What is the role of Cultural Studies as 
critical praxis in the present economic time?

Papers are invited to address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

The cultural politics of neoliberalism

·Precarious and/or immaterial labour

·Digital capitalism

·Capitalist affects

·Trump, Brexit and the resurgence of capitalist nationalisms

·Capitalism, culture and technology

·The cultural and creative industries

·Capitalism, culture and sustainability

·Cultures of surveillance and war

·Cultural identity and globalisation

·Cultural resistance and activism

·Productive and unproductive cultures

·Base, superstructure and mediation

·Formal and real subsumption of culture

·Representations of capitalism, class and markets

·Political economies of online, digital and social media

·Anticapitalist, Socialist, Anarchist and Communist cultures

·Racial capitalism

·Critical theory, Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies

The conference also accepts papers that fall within the general 
disciplinary area of Cultural Studies.

If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please send a 250 
word abstract with your name, e-mail address and affiliation to 
(csaa2017 /at/ massey.ac.nz) <mailto:(csaa2017 /at/ massey.ac.nz)> by August 1 2017. 
Any other enquires regarding the event should also be addressed to 
(csaa2017 /at/ massey.ac.nz) <mailto:(csaa2017 /at/ massey.ac.nz)>.

Organising Committee: Nicholas Holm (Massey University), Sy Taffel 
(Massey University), Holly Randell-Moon (University of Otago)
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