Living Cultures - Contemporary Ethnographies of Culture

The Institute of Communications Studies (ICS) and the Media Industries
Research Centre (MIRC) at the University of Leeds announces the open
registration of a 1½-day conference:

Living Cultures - Contemporary Ethnographies of Culture

Date: Monday March 30 (pm) 2009, Tuesday March 31 (full day) 2009

Location: The University of Leeds, UK

Keynote speakers:
Professor Les Back (Professor, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College,
University of London), author of The Art of Listening (2007) and New
Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives
(1996)

Professor Georgina Born (Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music,
University of Cambridge), author of Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the
Reinvention of the BBC (2004) and Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and
the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995)

Conference theme:
The ever-increasing importance of the cultural to the social brings with it
a vital need to investigate the processes implicated in contemporary meaning
making, symbolic consumption, production and mediation. Recent scholarship
from across the social sciences has sought to take up this challenge by
examining the multifariousness of cultural materials-in-use, continuities
and ruptures in the production/consumption of culture, the expanded purview
of cultural policy and the effects of an expanding 'cultural economy'.

Through its careful attention to the irreducibility of human experience,
ethnography has revealed an enduring ability to usefully intervene in
debates within these arenas, making explorations into culture and cultural
practice a quasi-specialism of ethnographic study. Yet how might 21st
century ethnography better attune itself to the opportunities and challenges
implied by attempts to understand contemporary culture and cultural
experience 'from the inside'? Indeed, what limitations or boundaries are
implied by efforts to study different cultural practices through ethnography
and what might this mean for ethnography's contribution to social theory?

This conference reflects on such questions and encourages speakers to share
the methodological, substantive and theoretical insights gleaned, as well as
the problems encountered, in the course of their own ethnographies of
culture.

'Living Cultures' should be of interest to scholars and particularly
ethnographers from within sociology and social policy, media and
communications studies, cultural studies, social/cultural anthropology and
other allied disciplines.

Further details, including a registration form can be found here <
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/sub1.cfm?pbcrumb=20th%20January%202009> .

contact: ics-conferences@leeds.ac.uk



Organising committee: Dr Mark Rimmer (convenor), Professor David
Hesmondhalgh, Dr Chris Paterson, Dr Eleri Pound, Anna Zoellner, all of the
Media Industries Research Centre, University of Leeds.