SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN

COVENTRY UNIVERSITY

Call for Papers
1999 CONFERENCE
 25th - 27th June 1999
"Living in a Material World"

Day 1:LOST PROPERTY? Materiality, Materialism and After

This day will address the place of the material object in contemporary
culture,
exploring the contexts in which things are produced, exchanged and
consumed. It will
necessarily explore the legacy of existing frameworks for interpreting
materiality -
Marxism, structuralism/semiotics, symbolic exchange, aesthetics, etc.
However, it will
also incorporate perspectives which breach such accepted views, and
question the very
material existence of the object within Late Capitalism.

1. The Ecstatic Object, or the Cultivation of the Artefact.
In the era of the virtual, the clone and the consumer, what is the
significance of the
materiality of the aesthetic/sublime, sacrificial/sacred,
economic/symbolic object. Do
artworks, relics and goods require a material dimension ?

2. In the Tracks of Hysterical Materialism.
Ethnographies, biographies and genealogies of consumption in Late
Capitalism. Marx?
Benjamin? Veblen? Simmel? Baudrillard? Jameson? Bourdieu ? Foucault ? -
whose tale
do we wish to tell about meaning and value in contemporary commodities and
specific
consumer cultures ?

3. Fetishes, Flags and Fashions: Objectifications of identity and
difference.
Dressing the self, dressing for others, wearing cultural values, shopping
as social life,
buying and belonging, producing and possessing identity - how can we
approach the
articulation of individual, social, ethnic and cultural identities through
material forms ?

Day 2: S/HE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY- Working Cultures

Despite (or maybe because of) the uneasy truce which exists between
workers in the
communication, media and cultural industries and media and cultural
studies teachers
and researchers, there appears to be a remarkable lack of curiosity about
the conditions
of work within those industries. Whilst anecdotal accounts of work within
the
industries do exist they seem particularly underresearched and
undertheorised. Further,
much recent research has focused on the audiences for the products of
communication,
media and cultural workers and ignored the conditions of their production.
We invite
contributions from industry and academia in the form of papers or
participation in
witness sessions, interviews or panel sessions, with a focus on examining
the material
practices of people working in print media, radio, popular music,
advertising,
marketing and politics.

Day 3: SPACE IS THE PLACE - The Environment as Discourse

1. Psychogeography - its origins in Situationalism, Debord & Vaniegem; the
British
Situationalist legacy; political, literary & filmic uses (Stewart Home,
Iain Sinclair,
Patrick Keillor); J.G.Gibson's ecological psychology - visual arrays &
affordances;
Walter Benjamin & the Arcades project; the flaneur since the Symbolists;
the
contemporary flaneuse and the female gaze.

2. Cultural geography; ; the politics of space (Lefebvre) and non-places
(Auge);
sexualised & gendered geographies; the racialisation of space; Sue
Golding's
impossible geographies; social selves and habitus ( Bordieu); social
construction of
subjects; mapping the subject; the geography of the person.

3. Literary geography; literary cities & locations (eg Gotham City,
Engels' Manchester,
Eliot & Conrad's London, Alan Moore's Northampton, George Elliot's
Coventry) &
the sense of place; 'lost' Black cities, ancient & modern; cinematic
cities; the city in art
& art in the city (Rachel Whiteread); land art.   


The deadline for proposals is 30th April 1999. Proposals for papers ( no
more than 300 words) 
or enquiries should be sent to:
Peter Playdon
School of Art & Design
Coventry University
Priory St.
Coventry CV1 5FB
Direct phone: (01203) 838511
Direct  fax: (01203) 838667
Email: [log in to unmask]




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