Dear all,

Below are details of a conference, Cultural Returns: Assessing the Place of
Culture in Social Thought, organised by the Pavis Centre for Social and
Cultural Research at the Open University, and to be held at St. Hugh's
College, Oxford from 18-20 September 2002. A small number of places are
still available for non-speakers at this conference, but they are going fast
(all speaker places are now allocated). The final deadline for registrations
is 31 August, but if you would like to come, we recommend that you register
as soon as possible, as we may well have to close registrations before this
date - demand for places has exceeded our hopes and expectations. 

You can register for this conference by downloading the Cultural Returns
registration form from the web site
(http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/pavis - then click on 'Cultural
Returns' or 'Future Events') and returning it by mail to the address given
on the form along with payment. If for some reason you're unable to download
the form, you can contact [log in to unmask] and request one.

Details, including a provisional programme, follow:

This major international conference brings together leading figures in
cultural studies, cultural and political theory, cultural history, cultural
geography, sociology of culture and cultural anthropology to debate the
place of culture in social thought in the wake of 'cultural turns' in a
number of disciplines, and the place of culture in putatively 'culturalised'
societies and economies.

Culture is increasingly central in contemporary societies. It is an
important force in social and political change; a key economic sector in its
own right; and it permeates our everyday lives. Meanwhile, culture has
become increasingly central to social thought. In a range of academic
disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, including sociology,
anthropology, history, geography, psychology, media studies, education,
politics, gender studies, economics and cultural studies, unprecedented
attention has been paid to issues of meaning, symbol and communication. But
how fruitful have the various "cultural turns" been? What have they
contributed to our understanding of the relations between culture and
society?

It is time for an assessment of the role of culture in societies and in
social thought, and for serious thinking about the most important directions
for future work. This conference, organised by the Pavis Centre for Social
and Cultural Research at the Open University, and to be held in the
beautiful setting of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, will explore these issues
across the following key themes. 

· Culture and social thought
· Cultural economy
· Culture and governance: rethinking the regulation of culture, and the role
of culture in social life 
· Culture and identity
· Culture, diaspora and globalization
· Media culture

Confirmed keynote and plenary speakers include: Tony Bennett, Anthony
Elliott, Nancy Fraser, Richard Johnson, Meaghan Morris, David Saunders,
Beverley Skeggs and Margi Wetherell. 



CONFERENCE TIMETABLE

Please note that meals are only available if already booked in advance.
Breakfast is 
included in the cost of accommodation. The plenary sessions are still
provisional at 
this stage.

Wednesday 18 September

12 noon - 6pm Registration desk open at main entrance to St. Hugh's College

NB lunch is not available at St. Hugh's on this opening day. Pubs, sandwich
shops 
and restaurants can be found in North Parade, only five minutes' walk from
the 
College. Tea and coffee facilities are available in all rooms.

1.30-3.00 Opening Plenary

Beverley Skeggs - The Shifting Self: Making Personhood into Cultural
Property 
Tony Bennett - Returning to 'Culture'

3.00-3.30 Tea and coffee in the Maplethorpe Building foyer

3.30-5.00 Session 1

5.00-5.30 Break

5.30-7.00 Session 2

7.00-8.00 Drinks reception, hosted by Sage Publications, Maplethorpe
Building foyer

8.00 Dinner in the dining hall, St. Hugh's College (only available if booked
in 
advance through the conference organisers)

9.00pm-12 midnight College bar open



Thursday, 19 September

8.30-12 noon: registration in the Maplethorpe Building foyer

8.00-8.45 Breakfast (available to everyone who has booked accommodation at
the 
College)

9.00-10.30 Session 3

10.30-11 Tea and coffee, Maplethorpe Building foyer

11.00-12.30 Plenary 2

Roundtable discussion: Questions of personal identity

Anthony Elliott - Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Question of
Representation
David Saunders - Legal Person/Religious Identity
Margi Wetherell - title to be confirmed

12.30-2.00 Lunch in the dining hall

2.00-3.30 Session 4

3.30-4.00 Tea and coffee, Maplethorpe Building foyer

4.00-5.30 Plenary 3

Nancy Fraser - Distorted Beyond All Recognition: On Culture and Economy in 
Capitalist Society (A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth)
Richard Johnson - Distinctive Dialogues: Cultural Studies in a Cultural
World

7.00-8.00 Drinks reception to celebrate the publication of Gary Bridge and
Sophie 
Watson (eds.), The Blackwell City Reader and The Blackwell Companion to the
City, 
hosted by Blackwell Publishers, and introduced by Linda McDowell (Professor
of 
Geography, University College London).

8.00pm Dinner in the dining hall

9.00-12 midnight College bar open

Friday, 20 September

8.00-8.45 Breakfast

8.30-12 noon Registration in the foyer of the Maplethorpe Building

9.00-10.30 Session 5

10.30-11.00 Tea and coffee, Maplethorpe Building foyer

11.00-12.30 Session 6

12.30-2.00 Lunch, St. Hugh's dining hall

2.00-3.30 Session 7

3.30-4.00 Tea and coffee, Maplethorpe Building foyer

4.00-5.00 Closing plenary

Meaghan Morris - Implementing 'Globalisation': Translation, Cultural Studies
and 
Educational Reform

5.00 Thankyous and au revoirs



SESSION 1

Panel 1.1
MEDIA CULTURE 1
Wednesday, 18 September 3.30-5.00
Wordsworth Room

Shakantula Banaji - Youth Audiences, Culture and Hindi Commercial Cinema:
The 
Viewing Context in London and Bombay   
Magnus Andersson - Media Use and Spatial Negotiation  
Andrea Press - Teens Talk: Reflections on Media Ethnography across the
Atlantic 
Divide  
Nick Perry - Virtual Spectatorship and the ANT/ipodal  


Panel 1.2
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 1
Wednesday, 18 September 3.30-5.00
Conservatory

Don Slater - Rethinking Economies: 'Culturalism', Cultural Turns and Social 
Analysis  
Katrina Schlunke - Me, You, History and the Trauma of the Cultural Turn 
Morten Valbjørn - Culture AND IR, Culture IN IR: Culture-Blind,
Culture-Blinded 
and Culturally Conscious Currents within the Discipline of International
Relations  
Jeremy Gilbert - Culture / Discourse: After Logocentrism 


Panel 1.3 
IDENTITY 1
Wednesday, 18 September 3.30-5.00
MTB Seminar Room

Karen Henwood - Imaging Difference: Masculinities, Identities and the 'New
Father'  
Victoria Robinson - Taking Risks: Masculinities, Identities and Rock
Climbing  
Hillevi Ganetz - The King of the Woods and the King of the Beasts: Nature,
Culture 
and Gender in Televised Wildlife Films  
Bruce Horsfield - The Political Appropriation of a Cultural Elite: the
Australian SAS 
Regiment and the Tampa incident  


Panel 1.4
CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE 1
Wednesday, 18 September 3.30-5.00
MGA Lecture Room

Martina Böse - Contemporary Urban Culture and the Governance of 'Cultural 
Diversity'  
Sandra Trienekens - Art versus Culture: the West versus the Rest  
David Alcaud - Rediscovering Culture in Social Thought: Italian Debates Upon
the 
Reinvention of A Polity  
Melinda Rose Silva - The Mirror Has Two Faces: How the Victoria and Albert 
Museum Manufactures "Britishness" in the New British Galleries  


Panel 1.5
IDENTITY 2
Wednesday, 18 September, 3.30-5
Buttery Bar

Suki Ali - Classing Ethnicity: Racialisation and Cultural Processes  
Bing Feng - "I Don't See Myself as Different" - Chinese School Children in
Northern 
Ireland  
Mary Caputi - De-Aestheticized Art and Feminist Praxis: Some Thoughts on
Theodor 
Adorno 
Sally Munt -Spatialising  the Self: A Critical Re-evaluation of Foucault
with 
Cavarero


SESSION 2

Panel 2.1 
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2
Wednesday, 18 September, 5.30-7.00
Wordsworth Room

Mickaël Vaillant - title to be confirmed 
Mark J. Smith - Whose Turn Is It?: the Significance of the Argument for a
Cultural 
Turn  
Lilli Zeuner - The Concept of Culture in Classical and in Contemporary
Sociology: 
Between Integration and Differentiation  
Jeremy Valentine - Disagreeable Culture  


Panel 2.2
CULTURAL ECONOMY 1
Wednesday, 18 September, 5.30-7.00
Conservatory

Olav Velthuis - Circuits of Commerce  
Brett Neilson - The Returns of Money Laundering: Transformations of Value in

Global Capitalism 
Ronan Le Velly - Market Transactions Sociology versus Market Sociology  
Grégoire Mallard - Epistemological Implications of the 'Cultural Turn' for
Economic 
Sociology 


Panel 2.3 
DIASPORA AND GLOBALIZATION 1
Wednesday, 18 September, 5.30-7.00
MTB Seminar Room

Nick Stevenson - Cultural Citizenship, Cosmopolitanism and the Information 
AgePaddy Dolan and Pierre McDonagh - The Movement of People, the Movement of

Culture, and the Deployment of Nation: Between Home and Belonging For Asylum

Seekers in Ireland  
Motti Regev - Cultural Uniqueness, Cultural Sameness and Contemporary
Cultural 
Forms  
Jeffrey Roberts - the Transformation of Scottish Nationalism: Publics,
Events and 
Network Switchings 



Panel 2.4
CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE 2
Wednesday, 18 September, 5.30-7.00
MGA Lecture Room

Nick Couldry - Culture and Forgetting; Or, Can the 'Digital Divide' Be
Governed 
and Should We Allow It To Be?  
Joy Pierce - Communication Unplugged: The Digital Divide One Community At A 
Time 
Kendall R. Phillips - Phantoms of the Fall: 'Culture' Versus 'Public' in 
Contemporary Critical Theory  
Julianne Stewart - Cultural Syncretism, Communication Technologies and 
Citizenship: A Case Study of Recent Italian Immigrants in Australia 


Panel 2.5
IDENTITY 3
Wednesday, 18 September, 5.30-7.00
Buttery Bar

Jane Kilby - The Society of Language: Reading the Subject Through Levinas  
Ole M. Høystad - Anthropology and Cultural Studies: Rethinking Or Replacing 
Identity with Integrity 
Shi-Xu - Culture and Person as Discourse  
Stephen Pritchard - Cultural Calculus: Cultural Politics, Contemporary
Indigenous 
Art and the Work of Peter Robinson  


SESSION 3

Panel 3.1
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 3
Thursday, 19 September, 9.00-10.30
Wordsworth Room

Svante Beckman - How Big Is Culture?  
Andrew Calcutt - After Society: the Rise of Cultural Thinking, the Demise of
Social 
theory, and the Partial Return of the Pre-Modern  
Imre Szeman - Culture and Globalization; Or, the Humanities in Ruins  
Allan J. Sutherland - Night and Day: The Crepuscular Nature of the Cultural
Turn in 
Contemporary Jazz Studies  



Panel 3.2
MEDIA CULTURE 2
Thursday, 19 September, 9.00-10.30
Conservatory

Paul Frosh - What Makes an Image? Cultural Authority, Commercial Dynamics
and 
the 'Becoming' of a Visual Product  
Jane Stokes - Niche Marketing in a Multi-Media Economy: The Magazine
Industry 
and the Challenge of the Internet 1995-2002  
Fang-chih Yang - Representing Western Feminism in Taiwanese Popular Media  
Lynda King - Middle-Aged Women: Discourses of Decline and Decay  


Panel 3.3
IDENTITY 4
Thursday, 19 September 9.00-10.30
MTB Seminar Room

Belinda Morrissey - The Impossible Subject: Legal and Media Cultures' Denial
of 
Agency To Women Who Kill  
Avril Maddrell - Consumption, Donation and Voluntary Work: Sources of
Identity in 
Charity Shops 
Paula Black - 'What Suits One Doesn't Suit Everybody': Negotiating 
'Appropriateness' in Everyday Life  
Abigail Gardner - Dangerous Divas and Desires  


Panel 3.4
CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE 3
Thursday, 19 September 9.00-10.30
MGA Lecture Room

Lily Hoffman - Tourism, the Political Economy and Culture of the inner City
- New 
Opportunities, Continuing Constraints  
Keith Hollinshead - Worldmaking: the Underexamined Agency and Authority of 
Tourism in the Manufacture of Peoples, Places, and Pasts  
Sibel Yardimci - Sponsoring Festivals, Selling Istanbul: Arts Or Market?  


Panel 3.5
DIASPORA AND GLOBALIZATION 2
Thursday, 19 September 9.00-10.30
Buttery Bar

Sarah Parry - Writing Home: (Dis)locations in Contemporary Fiction  
Nabila Jaber - Homing and Belonging in the New Diaspora Gender, Investment
and 
Ethnicity  
Fatma Tutuncu - Rethinking Cultural Transformation: Performing in the City, 
Performing the City  
Matthias Zick Varul - Religions Vs. Consumer Culture: Protestantism and
Islam 
under the Hegemony of Consumerism  


SESSION 4

Panel 4.1
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 4
Thursday, 19 September 2.00-3.30
Wordsworth Room

Stephen Duncombe - Cultural Strategies in Contemporary North American Direct

Action Movements  
Melissa Gregg - Useful Politics: A Cultural Studies Toolbox for Electric
Fences  
Giovanni Porfido - Becoming Visible: Gay Identity and Visual Justice  
Marc V. Steinberg - When Politics Goes Pop: On the intersections of Popular
and 
Political Culture  

Panel 4.2
CULTURAL ECONOMY 2
Thursday, 19 September 2.00-3.30
Conservatory 

Andreas Wittel - Culture as a Productive Force  
Karin Becker - Vernacular Photography in the Space of Contemporary Visual
Culture  
David Wright - 'Consuming' Work in a Market for Symbolic Goods  


Panel 4.3 
IDENTITY 5: CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES I
Thursday, 19 September 2.00-3.30
MTB Seminar Room

Lisa Blackman - Inventing the Psychological: Lifestyle Magazines and the
Fiction of 
Autonomous Selfhoods  
Caroline Bainbridge - Making Waves: Constructions of Subjectivity and
Spectatorship 
in the Cinema of Lars Von Trier  
Corinne Squire - Personal Experience as Cultural Genre: The Case of HIV  


Panel 4.4
CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE 4
Thursday, 19 September 2.00-3.30
MGA Lecture Room

Beatriz García - Towards a Cultural Policy for Major Events: Lessons and 
Challenges from Barcelona (1992-2004)  
Selvaraj Velayutham - Cosmopolitanising Singapore: Cultural Development in a

OEWannabe Global City  
Sabine Menu - title to be confirmed 
Bernard Deacon - Regions Galore: Communities, Territories and European
Funding 
in the South West of England  

Panel 4.5
IDENTITY 6 
Thursday, 19 September 2.00-3.30
Buttery Bar

Shiaw-Chian Fong - Hegemony and Identity in the Colonial Experience of
Taiwan, 
1895-1945  
Maria Kaustrater - 'You can't escape it...' - Certainties and Uncertainties
of Maori 
Identity  
Skaidra Trilupaityte - Ethical Problems of Post-Soviet Elites
Maggie Ivanova - The Different Drums: Dispelling Territorial Dimensions  


SESSION 5


Panel 5.1 
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 5: 'APPLYING' CULTURE: THE 
CULTURAL 'LENS' AND EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON SELF AND IDENTITY
Friday, 20 September 9.00-10.30
Wordsworth Room

Anne W. Esacove - De-coupling: Sex, Reproductive and the Narrative Self  
Claire Decoteau - Beyond Discourse: 'Testimonial' Activism and the
Performance of 
AIDS  
Cynthia Miller - (Re)constructing German National Identity: Generation Y's
New 
Cultural Formation of National Belonging  


Panel 5.2
MEDIA CULTURE 4
Friday, 20 September 9.00-10.30
Wordsworth Room

Liz Jacka - Doing Television History: the intersection of Social and
Cultural 
Perspectives  
Christine Fanthome - The Changing Cultural Role of Television in Postmodern 
Britain 
Jeongmee Kim - Selling 'Popular' British Cinema: Promotional Activities in
the 
1990s   
John Astley - Herbivores Versus Carnivores: the Struggle For Democratic
Cultural 
Values in Post 1945 Britain  


Panel 5.3
DIASPORA AND GLOBALIZATION 3
Friday, 20 September 9.00-10.30
MTB Seminar Room

June Yi-Chun Wang - A Bridge Too Far? English As A Communicative instrument 
and Taiwan's Imagery of Globalisation  
Masae Yuasa - Globalization in Sino-Japanese Apparel/Textile Joint Ventures;
An 
Escape from Power, Culture and Commitment  
Martha A. Starr - Reading The Economist On Globalisation: Knowledge,
Identity and 
Power  


Panel 5.4
CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE 5
Friday, 20 September 9.00-10.30
MGA Lecture Room

Tania Lewis - Academic Networks and the 'New' Managerialism: Competing 
Organisational Cultures in the Informational University  
James Donald - Media Freedom and Academic Autonomy: Two Principles of
Cultural 
Governance  
Elaine Lally - Useful? Relevant? Thinking Through the New Agendas For
Cultural 
Research
Bruce McLeod - Cultural Fences, Historical Fronts, and Spatial Feints  


Panel 5.5
IDENTITY 7 
Friday, 20 September 9.00-10.30
Buttery Bar

Beccy Watson - Exploring Constructions of Culture at the Local Level  
Audrey Garcia - Urban Construction in the Margins: Chicano Identity  
Maxine Craig - Next Year I'm Changing My Place of Origin: Identity and
Conflict in 
Papua New Guinea
Ioana Szeman - The Roma and Performance: Redefining Culture and Minority
Rights 
in Post-Communist Romania  


SESSION 6


Panel 6.1
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 6
Friday, 20 September 11.00-12.30
Wordsworth Room

Kenneth Oman - Framing the Picture: The Narratives of Racial Profiling  
Koray Tutuncu - Hunger Strikes in Turkey and the Limits of Governmentality  
Achim Schlüter - 'Enough Is Enough' A Community Born and Bred in Close 
Proximity To a Petrochemical Complex Starts To Complain  

Panel 6.2
CULTURAL ECONOMY 3
Friday, 20 September 11.00-12.30
Conservatory

Develeena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke - The Indian Ocean: Cultural, Economic
and 
Social Value 
Sebastian Touza - Post-Fordist Reproduction and the Political Economy of
informal 
Learning  
Lynne Pettinger - Brand Culture and Branded Workers  
Elizabeth Moor - Branded Spaces: Work and Creativity in the Cultural Economy




Panel 6.3
CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE 6: PASSIONATE CITIZENS?
Friday, 20 September 11.00-12.30
MTB Seminar Room

Matt Hills - Scare Stories: Horror Fandom, Passionate Citizenship and the
Genre of 
Moral Panic 
Sanna Inthorn - Passion of the Nation: Civic Identity, Collective Empathy
and 
Sacrifice  
Justin Lewis - Rationality, Media and Public Opinion  
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen - Resisting the Incitement to Silence: Hegemony and 
Rationality in the British Press Coverage of the 2001 May Day Protests  

Panel 6.4
IDENTITY 8: CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES II
Friday, 20 September 11.00-12.30
MGA Lecture Room

Jan Campbell - Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology and Cultural Studies  
Ros Gill - From Sex Object to Desiring Sexual Subject: A Step Forward for
Media 
Representations of Young Women?  
Elizabeth Edgington - Psychoanalytic Ethnography: Using Psychoanalytic
Theory 
and Experience 

Chair: Valerie Walkerdine


Panel 6.5 
DIASPORA AND GLOBALIZATION 4
Friday, 20 September 11.00-12.30
Buttery Bar

Ayhan Kaya - Reification of Culture in the Cirsassian Diaspora  
Reinhart Lutz and Hanh Nguyen - Culture and Diaspora: Paris By Night and the
(Re-
)Creation of Culture for a Global Vietnamese Exile Community
Amanda Wise - Embodying Exile: Nation, Exile, Diaspora  
Shih-hung Sean Wu - Visual Culture and Diaspora: The Politics of
Transcultural 
Identities in the Case of 'British Chinese' Artists  



SESSION 7

Panel 7.1
MEDIA CULTURE 3
Friday, 20 September 9.00-10.30
Conservatory

Jennifer Mandel and Lindsay Fisher - Let's Roll: 9/11, Postmodernism, and
Media 
Spectacle  
Mikko Lehtonen - Textual and Cultural Multimodality  
Mirca Madianou - Mediating the Nation: Contesting Culture, Media and
Identities in 
the Greek Context  
Alana Lowe-Petraske - Kinetic Music and Rhetorical Reduction: Collectivity, 
Authority and Music Online

Panel 7.2
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 7 
Friday, 20 September 2.00-3.30
Conservatory

Allen Chun - The Disciplinary Divide: Is there A Bottom Line in Cultural
Studies?  
Johan Fornäs - Bananas in Pyjamas and the Limits of Culture  
S. Fuller - Remembering Old Times: Where's the Radical Pedagogy in
Contemporary 
Cultural Studies?  
Paula Saukko - From Triangles and Prisms To Dialogues: Combining
Methodologies 
in Cultural Studies  

Panel 7.3
CULTURE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 8
Friday 20 September 2.00-3.30
MTB Seminar Room

Robin Goodman - Slick Lit
Kenneth J. Saltman - Oil Education 
Lisanne Gibson - Cultural Policy and the Built Environment- Pump Priming for
Who?
Alison Wilde - Performing Disability: Investigating Audience and Identity in
the 
Interpretation of the Soap Opera Genre. 

Panel 7.4
IDENTITY 9 
Friday, 20 September 2.00-3.30
MGA Lecture Room

Mike Brennan - Books of Condolence: Some Cultural Reflections on Condoling
in the 
Popular Postmodern 
Joanna Lowry - Studio/Therapy Room/The Perverse Self  
Iskendar Savasir - The Turkish Experience of Islam: Initial Psychoanalytical

Considerations  
Cynthia Hazen - A Socio-Cultural Analysis of the Ethical Standards of Care
in 
Psychtherapy Professions in the United States: Psyhchiatry, Psychology and
Social 
Work 



Panel 7.5
IDENTITY 10
Friday, 20 September 2.00-3.30
Buttery Bar

Caroline Ford - Nature, Culture and Conservation in the French Social
Imagination  
Jeremy Stolow - Religious Brainwashing: A Secular Moral Panic
Wendy Bottero and Sarah Irwin - Locating Differences: Values, Claims and
Changing 
Social Relations  
Catherine Degnen - Constructing the Ageing Self in South Yorkshire