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[Apologies for cross-posting] Call for Papers Taking matters into third hands: intermediaries and the organization of the creative economy AAG 2011, Seattle, April 12-16, 2011 Session organized by: Bas van Heur (Maastricht University) and Doreen Jakob (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) For the past twenty years geographers have been analyzing the meaning, role and importance of the creative economy. It is heralded as a job and wealth creator and as a prominent tool for urban and regional revitalization. Whether one agrees with these assertions or not, the effectiveness and ethics of the creative economy will largely depend on the intermediaries that shape and regulate it. While much attention has been paid recently to the political projects that introduce a focus on the creative economy, less is known about the intermediaries that organize and govern it. When implementing dominant policy imaginaries, intermediaries translate and transform them in often unexpected ways. Various intermediaries shaping the development of the creative economy can be identified, including: arts and cultural councils, policy networks, economic development agencies, foundations and unions to arts collectives, cultural centers, creative industries incubators, festivals and tradeshows as well as crowd-sourcing and web 2.0 technologies or marketing and consumption websites. All these intermediaries are bound together by their critical involvement in and shaping of the production and consumption of creative goods and services. This session aims to investigate intermediaries and to further explore their role in producing the creative economy. We welcome papers from diverse conceptual and empirical perspectives that address one or more of the following themes: • Comparisons between intermediaries in various sectors of the creative economy • Role of intermediaries in (re)producing hierarchies and in- and exclusions • Effectiveness of state-led creative economy initiatives in supporting change and innovation in existent creative networks • Useful methods for analyzing intermediaries that move beyond mainstream policy mapping documents or generic academic critiques • Impact of intermediaries on the organization of creative labor and producer-consumer relations • Role of intermediaries in the development of new models of individual and collective creativity • Hyper-instrumentality i.e. the potential of over-regulation as a result of the proliferation of creative economy intermediaries. Above all, this session aims to provide a forum to not only investigate these themes but also to establish a basis for future research on intermediaries in the creative economy. If interested, send a title and abstract (250 words) to Bas van Heur ([log in to unmask]) and Doreen Jakob ([log in to unmask]) by October 1, 2010. Please contact us if you have any questions. ___________________________________ Dr Doreen Jakob Visiting Scholar University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Communication Studies Chapel Hill, NC, USA Research Associate German Research Foundation (DFG) Emmy Noether Research Group Urban Renaissance Mega-Projects Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin, Germany -------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA mailing list -------------------------------------------------------- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the MECCSA list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MECCSA&A=1 ------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education. Membership is open to all who teach and research these subjects in HE institutions, via either institutional or individual membership. The field includes film and TV production, journalism, radio, photography, creative writing, publishing, interactive media and the web; and it includes higher education for media practice as well as for media studies. This mailing list is a free service from MeCCSA and is not restricted to members. For further information, please visit: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/ --------------------------------------------------------