The Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture
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In the past forty years, popular culture has only grown more prominent in society and developed new ways of engaging the public. Popular culture has become increasingly mobile through smart phones, webisodes, memes, and social media blurring the boundaries between producers and consumers. Simultaneously, cultures in general have become increasingly mobile through the spread of and contact between peoples, ideas and technology; making the production and consumption of culture a truly transnational affair. In light of increased cultural mobility made possible by new modes of technology, we must consider how popular culture scholarship has grown (and can continue to grow) to accommodate such new cultural modalities.
This year's conference will seek to explore this theme by asking questions such as
• How has the increased mobility in terms of culture, people, and technology had an effect on appropriation of cultures, (anti)nationalism, social and political change, tourism, diasporic experiences and how do we begin to theorize these interactions?
• How do we reimagine/reconstruct literatures, languages, narratives and identities in cyber societies? Has transmedia and convergence culture shaped our interaction with popular texts and affected pop cultural narratives?
• How has new media shaped interactions between popular culture and individuals?
• With increasing shifts in culture, have there been similar shifts in the representation of disabled, gender, sexual, race, and ethnic identities?
• Which new media, texts, genres, etc. deserve attention from academics and scholars?
• How have these shifts altered the study popular culture, and how do we continue to explore them?
• Explorations of specific popular culture texts, genres, trends and approaches
