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] --- Internet Message Header Follows --- Received: from it.surrart.ac.uk (193.62.44.2) by mail.staff.surrart.ac.uk (FirstClass Mail Server v5.1) transient id 530; 4:44:05 PM +0000 Received: from mercury.coventry.ac.uk by it.surrart.ac.uk id aa01213; 21 Dec 98 16:16 GMT Received: from m1-7b-2.coventry.ac.uk (m1-7b-2.coventry.ac.uk [194.66.38.136]) by coventry.ac.uk (8.8.7/8.6.11) with SMTP id QAA09544; Mon, 21 Dec 1998 16:39:18 GMT Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 16:37:01 GMT From: Peter Playdon <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Call for papers To: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask] Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]> Priority: Normal MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%