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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)