Call for Papers

CULTURAL DIVERSITY FOR SALE: GLOBAL ECONOMIES OF ART AND ENTERTAINMENT

An interdisciplinary conference at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, September
20-21, 2002.

Papers invited in any discipline. Send 500-word abstract and short CV to
conference organizer Janell Watson, [log in to unmask] Electronic submissions
only, please. Deadline: June 1, 2002.

Conference website: www.fll.vt.edu/watson/symposium

About the topic:

While globalization enhances cultural diversity by bringing together people
from many countries and traditions, it also threatens cultural diversity by
creating an international mass culture through film, television, and
advertising. This paradox has become familiar in globalization studies.
Economic considerations often drive both the migration of people and the
spread of the new mass culture. What is the relationship between economics
and culture? What is the place of art and cultural traditions in a world
dominated by a market-driven global mass media? Must cultural diversity
offer itself for sale, in order to survive?

The ever accelerating pace of globalization in what seems to be all spheres
further complicates the already daunting task of drawing intelligent
connections between economics and culture. Culture, high and low, seems to
be but one more product circulating unevenly among rich and poor, first
world and third world, North and South, East and West. Cultural products,
along with their producers, marketers and consumers, are marked by
differences of many kinds: gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality,
religion, political affiliations, sexuality. The global economy is itself
multiple: there are global economies of goods, services, and equities, but
there are also global economies of music, film, plastic and performing arts,
ideas, language, fashion, food, lifestyle, tourism, sexuality, sports,
psychic structure, belief, and even environment (i.e., the trade in
pollution vouchers). Academic disciplines likewise comprise global
economies, involving transnational exchanges of scholars and publications
(print and electronic) which rely on a global circulation of funding.
Cultural difference informs each of these economies.

Papers are invited which address the relationships between the global
economy and cultural difference in specific areas of art, literature or
culture, from a contemporary or historical perspective.

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Dr. Janell Watson
Foreign Languages & Literatures
Virginia Tech
331 Major Williams Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0225
office: (540) 231-9009
fax: (540) 231-4812
email: [log in to unmask]
www.fll.vt.edu/french/


Matt McAllister   e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Communication Studies, Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA  24061-0311 USA  ph: 540-231-9830  fax: 540-231-9817

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite