ICS PhD Conference 2013

The Non-Financial Crisis: Politics, Media and Culture in the Present Economic Context

June 10, 2013, Leeds

Keynote Speakers

Professor Colin Sparks

Colin Sparks studied at Sussex, Oxford and Birmingham, and received a doctoral degree from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. For many years, he taught at the University of Westminster, where he directed the Communication and Media Research Institute. He joined HKBU in August 2011. In addition, he is involved in editing numerous journals in the field (Media Culture and Society, Chinese Journal of Communication, Journal of International Communication).

Colin Sparks is also the author of such notable books as Development, Globalization and the Media (2007) and Communism, Capitalism and the Mass Media (1997) and the co-editor of a wide selection of books, among them Towards a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century (with Andrew Calabrese) (2005) and Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards (with John Tulloch) (2000).

Professor Kate Oakley

Kate Oakley is Professor of Cultural Policy at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include the politics of cultural policy, work in the cultural industries, and regional development. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts in London, and worked for many years as an independent policy analyst and writer.

Following a career as a journalist, Kate worked for a number of years in information society policy. This included researching management consultancy as a knowledge-based industry, while a Research Fellow at Manchester Business School and Head of the Information & Communications Policy Group at the Policy Studies Institute. This covered research on intellectual property, the commercialization of public sector information, and the growth of information work and workers.

In 1997, she became a self-employed consultant/researcher working for a variety of public agencies, think tanks and research organisations. In this role, having worked on a large number of localised creative industry strategies, Kate developed an influential policy-informed critique of creative industries.

Conference Theme

The recent financial crisis that caused the collapse of large financial institutions, the bailout of banks by national governments, and the struggle of national and trans-national governments in tackling the crisis, has signalled the need for fundamental changes in economic and political systems.

In this conference we hope to interrogate the various aspects of the crisis. These aspects span beyond economic considerations to broader issues related to socio-political systems, media and cultural production. Almost all fields are affected by the crisis and forced to change. The changes in these fields are interdependent and will have important implications for our future. With this aim in mind we invite submissions which could address any of the following questions or investigate related issues:

1. Politics

• How is the crisis changing the way leaders appeal to audiences?
• How has the crisis influenced political agendas?
• How have governments been dealing with the communication of the crisis?
• Has the crisis brought about new forms of political action?
• Is the economic crisis encouraging citizen participation?
• Is it still possible for the public sphere to influence national government in times of transnational crisis?
• Has the crisis in anyway influenced the legitimacy of transnational institutions?

2. Media and Journalism

• How has the media represented the crisis?
• What are the challenges for communicating the crisis?
• Have journalistic practices changed due to the influence of the crisis?
• How have the economic crisis and budget cuts influenced media production?
• Have new media changed the way news is produced and distributed during crisis?
• Will the media play a different role in society after the crisis?
• Has new media been shrinking or expanding disparity between the North and the South during the crisis?

3. Culture

• Cultural labour and value creation: what impact has the crisis had on the dynamic between creative autonomy and market imperatives?
• Are the creative industries more resilient to the impact of the economic crisis than traditional manufacturing industries?
• What might the implications be of public subsidy cuts for culture and the cultural labour market?
• What roles can the cultural and creative industries play in promoting job creation and economic growth?
• Could the cultural industries play a real and significant role in the development and adoption of new socioeconomic models?
• Where does the culture industry debate lie today: what have been the effects of the commodification of culture?
• What is art’s relationship to social change? Is there legitimate faith in the autonomy of art as bound to the promise of a better world to come?
• What might be the outcomes of the economic crisis for European culture?

Please email 250-300 word abstract, with any institutional affiliation and brief biography, to the following email address by 1 April, 2013 (earlier submissions welcome): ics-pg-conference@leeds.ac.uk.

Programme and Abstracts

Programme and abstracts are available in PDF format (Updated May 23).

Registration

If you wish to participate in the ICS PhD Conference 2013, please register for the conference.