[Commlist] Call for abstracts: British Popular Culture(s) Conference

Call for abstracts: British Popular Culture(s) Conference.
We are pleased to announce the launch of the British Popular Culture(s) 
Network, with an inaugural annual conference taking place at Falmouth 
University, between 5-7th June 2025.

The conference is open to researchers, academics, PhD students, 
practitioners, artists, curators, archivists and activists working in 
and across all areas of British popular culture and cognate disciplines. 
Britain has a vibrant heritage and history of popular culture, and a 
long tradition of cultural thinkers who have linked spheres of popular 
culture together but also approached them as separate entities. 
Fundamental to a vibrant, diverse, and sustainable popular culture is 
active creative participation and critical thinking to change, contest, 
and renew. This conference continues this spirit, accepting 
contributions from those involved in all aspects of critical 
appreciation, cultural scenes and practices, and utilising various 
methodologies and multi/trans disciplinary frameworks. The aim of the 
conference is to create a space for participants to come together to 
share, discuss, and foster ideas and practices which challenge 
assumptions, focus research and generate new thinking.

British popular culture continues to experience extraordinary 
ideological and political provocations, whilst facing commercial and 
socio-economic pressures. These pressures and challenges have been 
amplified by the impact of the Covid pandemic and fourteen years of a 
hostile Conservative government. The conference takes as its premise 
that popular culture is an evolving, dynamic social and creative process 
involving the self, community, and wider social structures which 
circulate and navigate capitalism. At this pivotal moment the conference 
and network will build a community of connections across academia and 
the cultural industries, creating a third sector to support and sustain 
future work and collaborations through conferences, events, and 
research, amongst other activities.
Taking place in Falmouth, Cornwall, a site of importance at the 
intersection of popular cultures and education, the conference will work 
in partnership with the local creative industry to highlight and discuss 
challenges facing regional creative and cultural economies. A hope of 
the event is that the highlighting of the richness, uniqueness, 
solidarity and precarity of regional popular cultures and how they 
entwine with wider discourses across the British Isles will be taken up 
in different locales for future iterations of the conference.
We invite individual abstracts for papers, performances, spoken word 
pieces, and short films (no longer than 20 minutes in length), as well 
as themed panels (no longer than 60 minutes in length). We also welcome 
ideas for further creative content such as exhibitions and workshops 
that can be integrated into the event through conversations with the 
conference team. Much of this event will take place in popular culture 
spaces in Falmouth such as multi-purpose arts venues, music and stand-up 
comedy venues, and cinemas, ensuring a representation in place of the 
discipline specific and interdisciplinary ideas being discussed.


Possible topics to include, but not limited to:
Advertising
Architecture
Art
Board Games and Pastimes
Comedy
Comics
Costume
Dance
Design
Fashion
Film
Illustration
Journalism
Literature
Media
Music
Performance
Poetry
Pubs
Sport
Television
Video Games
Festivals and Events
Politics and popular culture
Cultural policy
Popular culture and democracy
Popular culture and social justice
Popular culture and environmental crisis
Popular Culture and inequality
Pedagogies of Popular Culture
Popular Culture and the REF
Popular Culture in/and Education
Gender, class, sexuality, race
Alternative scenes and practices, DIY culture.
Popular culture industries
Emerging modes
Regional, local, and national cultural and creative economies
National popular culture in a global context
Space, place, tourism
Consumerism
Capitalism, Co-option and Commodification
Colonial and postcolonialism
Precarity and Sustainability
Activism
Celebrity
Celebrity Activism and Dissent
Archives, curation, programming
Cultural thinkers
Digitalisation and digital technologies
AI and technological impacts
The Popularisation of Folk Cultures

Please submit an abstract no longer than 300 words, five keywords and a 
short bio (including contact details) to, 
(_britishpopularculture /at/ falmouth.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(britishpopularculture /at/ falmouth.ac.uk)>_ by *January 10th 2025* .
Organising committee: Kat Flint-Nicol, Neil Fox, Simon Poole, Julie Ripley.


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