[ecrea] International Conference Investigating Cultural Expertise/Colloque international la prescription culturelle en question

*Investigating Cultural Expertise*

*The Changing Roles of Programme Makers, Artistic Directors,
Curators and Critics*


Call for papers for an international conference organised by the Groupe 
d'Études sur la Prescription at the MSH de Dijon (France) on 5, 6 and 7 
April 2017.

With the support of the Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (UBC) and 
of the CIMEOS (UBC), and GERIICO (Lille 3) laboratories.


*Keynote speakers:***Philip Schlesinger (University of Glasgow), Tia 
DeNora (University of Exeter, by videoconference), Ghislaine Chartron 
(Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris)

*
*

*A Little HiStory…*

Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries provided the stage for what is 
commonly referred to as the Scientific Revolution, which was at once a 
new way of approaching knowledge, social organisation and how we relate 
to the world. One of the most significant expressions of this cosmogony 
was the rise and increasing professionalisation of the scientific 
sphere, and its corollary: the disqualification of popular forms of 
knowledge. At the same time, the different variants forms of 
Enlightenment philosophy, whether they were Cartesian or more 
experimental, stressed the importance of education, the ineluctability 
of progress and the reliability of scientific knowledge. This process of 
a body of professional experts being constituted and legitimised 
developed further throughout the 19^th century, in particular within 
what is usually known as the cultural sphere or the arts. The 
production, circulation and consumption of cultural goods, which took 
place in the public space and on dedicated markets, coincided with the 
rise of a host of organisations (the state, libraries, schools, 
foundations, galleries, musical editions, press, media etc.) and 
individuals (critics, art historians, librarians…) responsible for 
advising and educating art audiences (and markets).

All of this formed a vast galaxy that must be viewed as a continuum 
along which are positioned both expertsand consumers involved in 
relationships that are incessantly being reconfigured. Throughout the 
20^th century, at least in countries which had access to these 
resources, the rise of the performance and music industry, of radio, 
cinema, television, museums and more generally of communication networks 
led to a strong diversification of the modes of cultural expertise and 
their circulation. While this progress promoted the development of 
expert professions and networks, it also involved lay forms of 
expertise, approaches involving more or less mediation of knowledge and 
culture, and an informal world of advice between peers. As a result, 
amateur-consumers learnt to develop and organise their artistic 
universes and to make choices by combining various forms of expert 
recommendations – professional criticism, academic literature, media, 
participation in collective forms of evaluation, fanzines, advice from 
friends etc. The development of the communication tools offered by the 
Internet and the ways in which they are used have reconfigured, 
disseminated and multiplied mediations and forms of expertise. This 
entire set of practices thus blurs the traditional boundaries between 
professional and amateur practices of expertise.

*Questions*

This conference aims to describe, discuss and analyse various forms of 
cultural expertise, be they traditional or emerging ones, within the 
present context of increasing globalisation and of a crisis of 
expertise. In order to do so, we are putting forward a series of 
questions and hypotheses aimed at approaching cultural expertise in a 
wide-reaching and open manner:

First of all, how should we define culturalexpertise?Is it more of an 
exchange of information, of knowledge, of specific forms of expertise, 
of journalistic or academic criticism, of normative recommendations or 
commercial injunctions, of actions and techniques that promote 
reputations or even brands? Can we articulate (or not) these various 
ways in or stages? What can we learn from these various definitions of 
the very perimeter of culture? How do approaches from different academic 
disciplines – information and communication, media studies, sociology, 
art history, digital humanities – contribute to informing us about these 
processes?

Then comes the question of knowing who issues these expert 
recommendations and within what spaces? Are they institutions, 
companies, media, particular individuals, social groups (the fans of a 
TV series coming together online), technical instruments (a theatre 
season programme, search engines, online algorithms recommending 
particular purchases), artistic productions (a film, a TV series, a 
David Bowie record)? How can we describe and quantify the specificities 
of these various entities? Can we identify particular languages, 
objects, information channels or discourses that might be privileged by 
such or such a type of expertise? Are we essentially dealing with 
gatekeeperswhose function would be to select the “right products”, and 
therefore eliminate the “wrong ones”? What about the efficiency of 
thesevarious experts, and can we compare them with each other?

Thirdly: what of the relationship between experts and the recipients of 
their expertise? How can we describe the interactions, forms of 
appropriation, and uses of expert recommended contents at the individual 
or collective scale? How should we evaluate the role played in this 
generation of expertise by groups of fans, communities of users, and 
more generally by forms of knowledge sharing, both on and offline? Can 
we take the view that these interactions have an impact on the very 
forms of expertise? Can a comparative analysis of systems of expertise 
dating from before and after the internet allow us to identify changes 
in the cognitive or decision-making process? What forms of resistance, 
misappropriation and autonomy are displayed by the 
consumer/amateur/general public in the face of these various systems?

Next, in a world of cultural hyperchoice, what strategies do consumers 
employ to identify the experts who might be able to direct them? 
According to what standards do users place their trust in particular 
experts? What types of information practices and what objects are thus 
mobilised on /and/offline? Within the context of an expandingInternet, 
how can we analyse the respective positions of professional and amateur 
practices on the one hand, and the relationships between them on the other?

Finally, given these practices and their transformations, what does 
cultural expertise tell us about culture, its modes of dissemination and 
consumption, and about its various incarnations?


*Suggestions*

Based on these various leads, we are looking for papers that will 
illustrate and help us to understand what we might call the chain of 
expertise, meaning the entire set of players, techniques, discourses and 
the interactions between all of these that give rise to one or several 
expert recommendations. For example, a cultural blog does not just 
involve a blogger, a blogosphere and internet users, but also comments, 
links, recurrent content, a lay-out, an access provider, indexing sites, 
measuring the audience and the online reach etc. Viewing expertise as a 
series of interactions will probably lead us to also interrogate the way 
in which experts are (in)formed and to examine the ways in which users 
analyse and talk about their own relationships to artistic products. We 
might also examine local and common forms of “word-of-mouth”, which 
constitute more or less formalised modes of expertise and should be 
taken into account in an analysis of the chain of expertise.

Furthermore, might we not view cultural expert recommendation as a 
/trial/, meaning not just a situation where the efficiency of the expert 
and the trust of the user are tried anew each time, but also a space 
within which values and convictions are mobilised – a trial whose 
consistency and meaning bring into play practices, relationships, and 
action sequences taking the form of moments of unproductive trial and 
error? In this sense, we would welcome papers investigating the specific 
temporality of cultural expertise.

Generally speaking, we would welcome any comparative approach aiming to 
contrast forms of cultural expertise with other forms of expertise 
(legal or medical, for example). Finally, and still within a comparative 
perspective, works dealing with the differences in terms of articulation 
and practices in various countries would certainly enrich the 
perspectives opened up by this symposium.

Of course, this is not intended as an exhaustive list of suggestions, 
and the committee will take into consideration any other proposals.


Proposals for panel discussions or posters are also welcome.


The symposium is open to all disciplines and to transversal or even 
indisciplinary approaches.


*Procedure and Deadline for Submitting Proposals*

Proposals should take the form of a summary of a maximum of 3000 
characters in French or English, to which should be attached a short 
presentation of the author (status, connection to an institution, 
laboratory, email address). The proposals must outline the issues 
examined by the research project, the main lines of thought and the main 
bibliographical sources. They must be sent *before* *25 november 2016* 
to the following addresses:

_francois.ribac@u-bourgogne <mailto:francois.ribac@u-bourgogne>_.fr and 
(_fabrice.pirolli /at/ univ-lemans.fr) <mailto:(fabrice.pirolli /at/ univ-lemans.fr)>_

The organising committee will respond via email by *15 December at the 
latest.*

The symposium will be held in French and in English, and each speaker is 
requested to produce a Power Point-type presentation in english for 
his/her paper, which must include at least the titles of the various 
sections of his/her presentation.

We are planning to publish some texts based on the papers presented 
during the symposium in a peer-reviewed journal.


*Organising Committee*

Groupe d'Études sur la Prescription (GEP): Brigitte Chapelain, Émilie Da 
Lage, François Debruyne, Pierre Delcambre, Sylvie Ducas, Catherine 
Dutheil-Pessin, Fabrice Pirolli, François Ribac.



*Scientific Committee*

Chris Atton (Edinburgh Napier University), Andy Bennett (Griffith 
University), Jérôme Berthaut (UBC), Mélanie Bourdaa (Université Bordeaux 
3), Brigitte Chapelain (Université Paris 13), Émilie Da Lage (Université 
Lille 3), François Debruyne (Université Lille 3), Pierre Delcambre 
(Université Lille 3), Sylvie Ducas (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La 
Défense), Catherine Dutheil-Pessin (Université Grenoble Alpes), Carles 
Feixa (Universitat de Lleida),Sylvette Giet (Université de 
Versailles-Saint-Quentin) Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (Université 
d'Avignon), Éric Heilmann (UBC) Matthieu Letourneux (Université Paris 
Ouest Nanterre La Défense), Jean-Marc Leveratto (Université de 
Lorraine), Sophie Maisonneuve (Université Paris-Descartes), Isabelle 
Moindrot (Université Paris 8), Fabrice Montebello (Université de 
Lorraine), Nanta Novello Paglianti (UBC), Fabrice Pirolli (Université du 
Maine), Philippe Poirrier (UBC), François Ribac (UBC), Paola Sedda (UBC) 
Sarah Sepulchre (Université catholique de Louvain), Élodie Sevin 
(Université Lille 3), David Vandiedonck (Université Lille 3)




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