Conference of the CAMEo Research Institute on Cultural and Media Economies
6-8 September 2017, Stamford Court, University of Leicester, UK
https://www2.le.ac.uk/institutes/cameo/cameo-events/cameo-conference-2017-mediating-cultural-work-texts-objects-and-politics?uol_r=ebb171eb
https://www2.le.ac.uk/institutes/cameo/cameo-events/cameo-conference-2017-mediating-cultural-work-texts-objects-and-politics?uol_r=ebb171eb
Keynote Speakers:
- Angela McRobbie (Goldsmiths) author of ‘Be Creative’
- Jack Linchuan Qiu (Chinese University of Hong Kong) author of ‘Goodbye iSlave’
- John Beck (Westminster) & Matthew Cornford (Brighton) co-authors of ‘The Art School and the Culture Shed’
Other confirmed speakers: Mark Banks, Eleonora Belfiore, Bridget Conor, Doris Ruth Eikhof, Chris Land, Jo Littler, Kate Oakley, Dave O’Brien, Martin Parker, Keith Randle, Anamik Saha, Jennifer Smith Maguire, Claire Squires, Helen Wood, David Wright.
The expansion of cultural work – understood as activities of production in the creative and cultural industries, media and the arts – has been accompanied by a plethora of texts, discourses and representations about such work, as well as a whole range of policy narratives, descriptions and manifestos designed to specify and define the goods and qualities such work provides. Yet more critical accounts have also emerged to challenge the ways in which cultural and media work is mediated, as well as organised, managed and experienced – subverting common-sense understandings and more upbeat hegemonic narratives.
At the same time, new platforms and technologies of production are shaping the ways in which cultural work is undertaken (and understood) as a meaningful social practice, while the cultural industries themselves continue to produce expressive objects, goods and commodities that manifest and mediate the labour that has gone into their production, suggesting ways of consuming or engaging with them as ‘crafted’ objects or as symbolic forms.
This interdisciplinary conference therefore focuses on how cultural work and production is mediated – in terms of text, image, discourse, narrative, policy, ideology and fantasy, as well as through technology, materially, and in objective form. We are especially interested to discuss the politics of mediation – and to outline progressive challenges to an ‘expressive’ and ‘creative’ work that continues to be blighted by social exclusivity, inequality and injustice.