Centre for the Study of Popular Culture
and Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague
are proud to invite you to an international conference

 

"Listening to the Wind of Change":

Popular Culture and Post-Socialist Societies in East-Central Europe


organised in conjunction with
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb,

Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava,

Institute of Political History, Budapest,

Institute of Western and Southern Slavonic Studies, University of Warsaw,

and kind help of National Museum of Czech Republic, Prague.

 


 

18 – 19 October 2013 in Prague, Czech Republic

 

Despite important particularities amongst different countries of East-Central Europe the fall of state socialism brought new conditions for ways of production and distribution of popular culture. At the same time the “longue durée” nature of popular culture meant that it persisted beyond the late state socialist period. But did the dynamics of popular culture follow any of the shifts that marked the economic and political spheres? Which patterns of cultural production and reception were mobilized to influence popular culture and how important remained local contexts? How can we interpret these changes to reflect present-day societal problems? 

 
During the break up of multinational federal states such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia new elites utilized popular culture for nationalist mobilization (Holy, 1996; Barker, 1999; Gordy, 1999; Baker, 2010). Across East-Central Europe discourses of exclusion based on economic, professional, social, educational, age, gender, ethnic and racial characteristics were spreading and they found their expression in mass media and in popular culture in general (Verdery, 1996; Hann, 2002; Borenstein, 2008).
 
Understanding popular culture as a battlefield for hegemony and a sphere of conflicting power relations based in cultural, subcultural, and post-subcultural studies as well as postcolonial theory, and other lines of emancipatory thinking, we invite scholars from wide range of social science and humanities disciplines to present their research at the conference. 
 


Selected Issues

 

We welcome paper and panel proposals related to the conference theme, including but not limited
to such topics as:

 

  • Culture Transfer: Westernization and Commodification of the "East",
  • Culture of the Post-Socialist New Rich: Continuities with Late State Socialism and Neoliberalism,
  • Re-traditionalization, Nationalism, Exclusion and Mobilization in Popular Culture,
  • Fostering Free-market Ideology through Popular Culture,
  • Conflicting Memories of Anti-/Post-communism in Popular Culture,
  • Reflections of Sexuality and Gender in Popular Culture,
  • Exploitation Culture as Reply to Fast Changes in Post-Socialist Societies,
  • Visual Culture of Post-Socialist Societies of East-Central Europe,
  • Popular Culture in East-Central Europe as Commodity,
  • Travelling Cultural Theory (East West).