Anonymous Comrade submits "CulturePoles:

City Spaces, Urban Politics & Metropolitan Theory

Canadian Association of Cultural Studies

February 13-15, 2004, Hamilton, Ontario

Cultural Studies has, as Colin Sparks remarked twenty-five years ago, been constituted out of a "veritable rag bag" of competing ideas. Yet the leitmotifs of the field (commodification, reproduction, hegemony, mass culture, popular culture, and the culture industry) are suggestive of a shared genealogy in the historical transition from the manufacturing centre to the suburbanized spatialities of consumer society. In this respect, North American and European cultural studies can be viewed as a project almost coterminous with the shifting structure of the first-world capitalist city.

In the era of mechanical reproduction, the linkage between capital,
population and cultural production seemed unproblematic: New York, London,Tokyo, Shanghai and Paris were calculated as the five largest cities in the world. The diffusion of cultural goods from metropolitan to the periphery was a secondary question most often answered in terms of infrastructural capacity. Current economic, technological and demographic tendencies undermine this perceived position of the city as supra/structural template for mapping the production and consumption of social meaning. The concept of the "culturepole" seeks to facilitate a rethinking of this oft naturalized relation between cultural studies and the first-world capitalist city.

In this context, Culturepoles, the 2004 conference of the Canadian
Association of Cultural Studies, seeks to critically engage with questions of the location of culture and cultural studies through a conscious revisiting of the city as a site for the production of theory, dominant/resistant cultural practices, and as the location of radical politics. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- metropolitan theory

- ethnicity, race and the city

- the country, the city and the suburb

- cultural practices in and against the city

- urban activisms

- global cultural studies

- urban soundscapes and visualscapes

- regional cultural studies

- concentrations of cultural capital/production

- the politics of infrastructure

Papers that fall outside of the conference theme, but which deal with
topics in cultural studies, will also be considered. We are especially
interested in sessions organized by urban activists, artists and cultural workers, as well as reports from research groups and non-governmental organizations that deal with the issues outline above.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words (preferably in e-mail form) should be submitted before October 20th to cacs@mcmaster.ca or mailed to the address below. All presenters must be members in good standing of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies prior to the beginning of the conference.
(Update information on membership will be circulated shortly).

Please include the following information at the top of your submission: name, email, mailing address, phone number, and institutional affiliation (if applicable). Please also indicate on the abstract any A/V requirements. Presenters will have access to TV/VCR units and data projectors (for the latter, participants must provide their own lap top computers; there will be no live Internet access during the sessions). If there is sufficient demand, we will endeavour to provide equipment to play CDs as well.

The conference will be held in conjunction with the opening events of
"Future Cities," a major international art exhibit and speakers series
organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) over the course of 2004. The AGH has invited artists from around to world to present their work as part of this exhibition. Invited artists include Andreas Gursky (Germany), Thomas Struth (Germany), Stan Douglas (Canada), Catherine Opie (Britain), Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba), Bodys Iseek Kingiley (South Africa), Jin Me Joon (Canada), Ian Wallace (Canada), Roy Arden (Canada), Yin Xiuzhen (China), Iiona Nemeth and Jiri Suruvka (Czech Republic), Pavel Althamer (Poland), and others. Four artists will be in residence during the project and will
produce site-specific pieces based on their experience in Hamilton:
Eleanor Bond (Canada), Aglai Konrad (Belgium), Edward Burtynsky (Canada) and the architectural group M.V.R.D.V (Rotterdam). The event will kick off with two roundtables on "Contemporary Visions of Modern Metropolis" and "Visual Culture, Global Cities and Urban Identities," which have been scheduled so as not to interfere with Culturepoles. See http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.on.ca for more information on the AGH.

Both Culturepoles and "Future Cities" plans to invite a number of special guests to participate in these discussions. These will be announced as soon as they are confirmed.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Deadline: October 20th 2003

Canadian Association of Cultural Studies

c/o Department of English

McMaster University

1280 Main Street W.

Hamilton, ON L8P 1W3

Fax: 905-777-8316"