http://www.crossroads2002.com/
CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

WHAT IS THE CROSSROADS CONFERENCE?
Call for future Crossroads organizers
Call for Proposals
FAQ = Frequently Asked Questions

The international Crossroads conferences were started in 1996 in
Tampere, Finland to fill what we felt was a gap in the
international cultural studies community. Although cultural
studies was becoming increasingly international and
multi-centered - or rather centerless because of its virtual
nature - cultural studies people had scarse opportunities to see
each other and socialize. Specific cultural studies conferences or
seminars were occasional and often advertized only within a
particular region. Yet the very character of cultural studies as a
meeting place, as a crossroads between different people and
disciplines desperately pleads for international conference. That
is what we did, and the mission statement of the first Crossroads
in Cultural Studies conference still holds today:

Cultural studies is not a one?way street between the centre and
peripheries. Rather, it is a crossroads, a meeting point in
between different centres, disciplines and intellectual
movements. People in many countries and with different
backgrounds have worked their way to the crossroads
independently. They have made contacts, exchanged views and
gained inspiration from each other in pursuing their goals. The
vitality of cultural studies depends on a continuous traffic
through this crossroads. Therefore the conference organizers
invite people with different geographical, disciplinary and
theoretical backgrounds together to share their ideas. We
encourage international participation from a wide range of
research areas.

The first conference was an immediate success, attracting some
500 people from 38 countries around the world. Therefore, it was
decided that the Crossroads conference will be a regular event,
organized every second year. The second Crossroads conference
was organized in Tampere in 1998 and the third in 2000 in
Birmingham, United Kingdom. Birmingham, the hometown of the
legendary Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, attracted
over 900 participants.

After the Birmingham conference, the plan was that the
international tour of the Crossroads conference will continue to
Amsterdam. Unfortunately, Joke Hermes did not manage to get
funding for the arrangements, and another attempt to arrange it
in Canada failed because there was no available venue for it at
that time. Therefore, the conference will again take place in
Tampere, but we confident that after 2002, an endless world
tour of the Crossroads in Cultural Studies biannual conference will
get more wind under its wings and will also take it to other
continents than Europe.

Call for future Crossroads organizers

Where the Crossroads conference will be organized in future
years is also up to you. Before the Crossroads 2002 conference,
we kindly ask you to contact us and send us a proposal for
organizing the next conference. Hopefully, in the Crossroads
2002 there will already be a meeting that decides where the
Crossroads is going next, so that preliminary information about
the Crossroads 2004 can be given to the participants.

Could your institution organize the next Crossroads conference?
It takes some time and energy, but it has its obvious gains.

Although the organizers of the previous Crossroads conferences
can provide a tested, working system, including written material
as tools and instructions, organizing the conference requires a
local team and financial support from the university, government
or other sponsor. In return, the local organizing group will greatly
benefit from the intellectual inspiration that a big international
conference brought to their doorsteps will give not only them but
to the whole local academic community. In addition, the local
organizing institution will gain a lot of international visibility as a
place where cultural studies is practised.

We ask you to seriously think about it. Maybe organizing the
Crossroads conference is just the boost that your institution
needs. If you are at all interested, please do not hesitate to
contact us and ask for more information.

Call for Proposals

The mission of the Crossroads conference is to provide an open
forum for all topics that interest the diverse international cultural
studies community. In that way, the conference will also show
where cultural studies is going next. To succeed in this, we
especially encourage you to send us session proposals. You may
propose a session with a complete list of participants, or just
send us the title and session abstract, so people can see it
advertised and contact you with their paper proposals.

As said, you are free to propose sessions on any topics of
interest to the cultural studies community, but we assume that
the following topics will in one way or another be tackled in the
sessions:

Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Audiences
Body in Society
Consumption and Consumer Culture
Cultural Policy
Cultural Studies and History
Cultural Studies, Education and Pedagogy
Ethnicity and Race
High and Low, Art and Mass Culture
Identity Construction
Material Culture
Media Studies
Methodology
Nationhood and Nationalism
New Media and Information Technology
Popular Culture
Psychological Cultural Studies
The Culture of Cities
Youth Culture

If you are interested in organizing sessions on those or other
topics, please contact the organizers by filling out and sending a
session proposal. You can of course only send a paper proposal
to a session organizer (see the regularly updated list of sessions)
or directly to the organizers.

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