Ray Brown Conference on Popular Culture – Modes of Mobility: Popular Culture in an Age of Technology

This conference would like to explore 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 new cultural modalities.

The research topics will include:

• 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