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