The 14th International 'Culture & Power' Conference: 'Identity & identification'

Culture & Power Seminar
Under the auspices of the Iberian Association for Cultural Studies (IBACS)
 
The 14th International "Culture & Power" Conference: IDENTITY AND IDENTIFICATION
 
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha,
Departamento de Filologi­a Moderna
Facultad de Letras,
Ciudad Real, Spain22-24 April, 2010
Questions of identity and identification are among the most important evolving concerns of Cultural Studies today. Indeed, many thinkers, theorists and academics working in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies continue to wrestle with these slippery concepts in their explorations of “the production and inculcation of culture or maps of culture  (Chris Barker). Commonly apprehended as contingent, culturally specific and socially produced, identity is often conceived of as the result of a whole range of different, possible identifications linked to specific modalities of power under specific social and historical conjunctures, hence, the unstable and fluctuating nature of identity and identity formation. The tension between self-description and social ascription is fundamental for individuals and groups to construct, negotiate, defend and resist their self-understanding. Through a process of personal identification with discursively constructed subject positions, identities emerge across a wide range of cultural practices in the course of social interactions involving the use of language and other semiotic systems manifested in cultural artefacts of various kinds.
This conference invites 20-minute papers addressing the topic of identity and identification from a wide range of perspectives within Cultural Studies. Although other topics may be considered, we welcome papers dealing with, but not being limited to, issues such as the following:
1. Theorizing identity construction and identification processes from a (variety of) cultural studies perspective(s): identities as discursive-performative / unstable / multiple / fragmented / projects / constructed and negotiated / narratives of the self / etc.
2. Methods and perspectives for examining identity-construction and identification processes in culture and society: post-structuralist, feminist, psychocritical, discursive, linguistic, Marxist, Queer Theory, postmodern, ecocritic, postcolonial, etc.
3. From social and cultural identities to subjectivity and the self: dimensions of and interrelations between identity production, consumption, commodification, regulation, inculcation, and representation.
4. Identity and genre: identities in fiction, drama, poetry, film, television, print media, politics, advertising, education, the institutional, the Internet, etc. The role of cultural artefacts in identity-construction processes within circuits of culture in society.
5. Identity at the crossroads of cultural studies with its disciplinary neighbours (literary theory, sociology, linguistics, discourse studies, anthropology, media and communication studies, history, geography, musicology, philosophy, etc.).
6. Challenging, questioning and subverting identities: re-constructing, -inventing, -cycling, -visiting, -creating, -locating, -discovering, -examining, -jecting, -producing, -thinking, -versing, -vising, -vitalising, -reading, -writing identities in culture and cultural artefacts.
7. Gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, age, citizenship and religion issues: identity politics, hybridisation, border identities and subcultures.
8. The discourses of local, regional, national and trans-national identities: tensions between globalisation and nationalisms.
9. Identity and identification across cultural practices: diasporas, memory, trauma and body politics.
10. Identity and visual culture: intertextuality, multimodality, and the dialogue between the arts.
11. Historicizing identities: cultural history and the criticism of historical identities.
12. Identity and popular culture.
13. Identity in the Information and Communication society: e-identities, cyber-identities, virtual identities.
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