15th Annual Conference of the International Social Theory Consortium
"Capitalism, Culture and Critique" June 9-10, 2016
Call for Papers:
In the twenty-first century, as capitalism continues to consolidate power at the planetary level, culture has lost most vestiges of bounded autonomy. Music, art, literature, cinema, television and digital media are almost entirely subsumed as immaterial extensions of capital, simultaneously ideology and commodity. The significance of culture to contemporary capitalism has not gone unnoticed in social theory. A myriad of approaches have proliferated within and across disciplines.
For the 2016 annual conference, we especially encourage submissions that address the interrelationships between capitalism, culture and critique. Possible topics include:
The culture industry, consumptive alienation and capitalist culture New forms of ideology that employ novel strategies to captivate and capture consciousness, foreclose alternative visions of social change and future constellations of business, labor and government, and sustain and amplify the ongoing accumulation of capital Cultural relativism and the fragmentation and fracturing of the social Immaterial production, digital labor and working consumers: new modes of value extraction emerging in the culture-centric economy of the 21st century Cultural commodities (media, connectivity, tourism, travel, entertainment, high and low culture) that assume immaterial form and displace tangible commodities Ideology-critique in the age of cultural capitalism Culture in the field of tension between anthropology and sociology Emancipatory narratives, forms and modes of transmission in the age of cultural capitalism Cultural studies and/as/vs. critical theory Political Economies of Race Culture and circuits of capital: relationships between the credit system, productive system, distribution system, and consumption system under cultural capitalism Postcolonial Capitalism and Critique Identity politics and the disappearance of the self Race, Culture, and Critique Cultures and varieties of capitalism: prospects for resisting capital’s drive toward totally homogenous globalization Artifice and desire in cultural capitalism Massification of culture and the illusion of standards Strategies for survival in an age of cultural capitalism Posthumanism and the evolution of the nature-society link What is the future (if any) of the species?
Please email abstracts and/or proposals of sessions to krier@iastate.edu no later than 15 March 2016. The conference will be hosted by Dan Krier at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. For more information contact either of the conference co-organizers:
Dan Krier (krier@iastate.edu) Harry F. Dahms, Co-Director, ISTC (hdahms@utk.edu)