CALL FOR PROPOSALS Media and Cultural Policy from the Bottom Up
SCMS 2010 (Los Angeles, March 17-21, 2010)
Panel Organizer: Bill Kirkpatrick, Denison University ((mwkirkpa /at/ gmail.com) )
Media and cultural policy studies has a long tradition of treating the
official policy sphere of the state and media industries as "policy"
full stop, or at least the kind of policy that really matters. While
recent work under the banner of Critical Cultural Policy Studies has
begun to correct this tendency, and organized citizen activism often
makes an appearance as a countervailing force, there remains an
impulse to focus on top-down, institutional
actors backed by state and/ or economic power.
But this emphasis on official policy cannot account for the myriad
ways in which media and cultural policy is produced and lived at
multiple levels, nor the countless sites at which policy is produced,
negotiated, translated, enforced, or resisted. Therefore, I invite
submissions for a panel that will concentrate on studies of media and
cultural policy "from the bottom up." Papers may focus on any aspect
of media and cultural policy, but in keeping with the conference's
emphasis on laying the groundwork for the future of cinema and media
studies, I am especially looking for work that engages directly with
questions of how we study policy and that seeks to advance the field
critical cultural policy studies. Non-U.S. case studies are
especially welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
· Circumvention of or resistance to official policy
· Local implementations of state policy
· Grassroots, vernacular, and alternative policy regimes (e.g.
Creative Commons)
· The "family" or "parents" as policymakers, including
delegations of policy enforcement to individuals (e.g. content
warnings and controls)
· Ethnographies of lived policy in everyday life
· "Pirates" and policymakers
· "Unofficial" archives for new perspectives on media and
cultural policy
· Writing policy history from the bottom up
Please send abstracts (max. 250 words) to (mwkirkpa /at/ gmail.com) no later
than August 10, 2009.
Bill Kirkpatrick
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Denison University
Granville, OH 43023
(740) 587-0606 (h)
(740) 587-8512 (w)
(mwkirkpa /at/ gmail.com)
(kirkpatrickb /at/ denison.edu)
www.billkirkpatrick.net
