30 June and 1 July 2017
London South Bank University
Neo-liberal capitalism has asserted the primacy of “knowledge” in the cultural sphere. Its “Knowledge Economy” agenda has renewed the dialectics of reason and faith, autonomy and control, progress and tradition. “Creative Industries”, with their attendant emphasis on innovation, information and intellectual property, loom large in this renewal – as do accelerating market and managerial logics in the structures of education and governance that feed the broader “Cultural Economy”. Yet a period of “flexibility” and “disruption” appears to have prefaced a crisis of liberalism: post-truth, alternative facts and anti-expertise abound. What, for cultural actors, is to be welcomed or feared in this climate?
This stream of the conference seeks greater understanding of relations between knowledge, culture and economy. Centrally, it asks two questions:
- How are cultural knowledges situated, practiced and legitimated, such that they enter into circuits of production, distribution, consumption and valorisation?
- What can focused attention on cultural knowledge reveal about the broader context of social and political change?
Possible pathways might explore (but are not limited to):
- How expertise is made via researchers, teachers, advisors, brokers, analysts, “thought leaders”, knowledge exchange, apprenticeship, discipline-formation, credentialisation.
- The technical infrastructure of logistics, funding, markets, labour, management, monetisation, ownership, logging, measurement, prediction, analysis.
- Alternative knowledges of non-hegemonic communities, exploring how knowledge can be raced, classed, gendered or otherwise become minoritarian, as well as the role of gossip, rumour, myth, conspiracy theory.
Critical investigations are welcomed, whether contemporary or historical, from a range of theoretical and disciplinary positions. The stream assumes that the conceptual and the material are co-constitutive; as such, the mutual engagement of empirical description with critical re-theorisation is encouraged.
Deadline: 31 March 2017
Please send submissions to: paper-subs@londoncritical.org
Stream Organisers: Toby Bennett and Alexandra Reynolds
Click here for full conference CFP: http://londoncritical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/LCCT-CFP-2017-Final-170217.pdf
2017 Conference Themes
- Art in the Time of Capital.
- A/Political Feeling.
- Bridging Memory, Temporality and the Digital.
- Constructing Cultures of Collective Freedom.
- Desire and the Political: Exploring the Not-All of Language.
- Economies of Cultural Knowledge.
- Theorizing Ethics and Politics in Ethnographic Practice.
- The Good is Perfected by Care.
- Habit, Addiction, and Thought.
- NUDGE: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Choice Architecture.
- Politics and the Theological.
- Politics of Poverty.
- Radical Hospitality.
- Vernacular Aesthetics of the Global City.
About the London Conference in Critical Thought
LCCT aims to provide opportunities for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests. Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration.
Further Information
Further details are available at:
