The advent of neoliberalism after the 1970s in “core” western economies has unleashed a relatively deregulated and more palpably globalized economy. The results have been convulsive in the socio-economic concomitants and contradictions that have followed. They include: intensified, bare-knuckled class striation alongside tendencies toward intensified tolerance and mixing; finance that moves more readily across borders than (many) flesh-and-blood people; cosmopolitanism alongside re-invigorated identity essentialism; and places and identities stuck between global forces and renewed assertions of localism. And all of it subject to 24-hour globalized, new media display. In this confusing milieu, where billionaires preach faux populism, all that is solid melts into air and all that is holy is profaned. Moreover, the knowledge industries (universities, news media) have been gob smacked by internal and external pressures that have enabled bizarre versions of “postmodern” and anti-reality doctrines to gain currency.
While many features of the landscape look bleak, the prevalence of seams in the system and fissures within prevailing ideology suggest that today’s contradiction may be tomorrow’s consensus. The conference will attempt to sort out and tentatively make sense of the current condition of deeply inscribed contradiction through interdisciplinary dialogue. Scholars of communication and mass media, political science, literature, sociology, philosophy, ethnography global studies—anyone with interdisciplinary interests and bona fides—are invited to join in.
Topics of interest:—Capitalism & Culture—Media Representations of Contradiction: Film, TV, Music—Protest Politics—Contradictions in New Media: Theory and Practice—Class Politics—Activism & Quests for Social Justice—College Strife: Higher Education in the 21st century—Journalism: Its Defenders and Impersonators
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Justin Lewis, Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Application Process to Present: Please send an application in the form of a word document to the conference Scientific Committee at the conference email address (below).
The document should include (1a) your name, (1b) affiliation, and (1c) title; and (2a) the title of your paper, (2b) a 150-250 word abstract, and (2c) 3-5 keywords.
Conference Email Address: madrid.conference.2018@gmail.com
Application Due Date: 8 January 2018 at 18:00 / 6:00 PM (Madrid, Spain local time)
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