CFP: CULTURE ZONE 06
5 DAYS, 5 THEMES
FRANKFURT AM MAIN, 12-16 JULY 2006
CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: 30 APRIL 2006
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
RÖMERBERG
D-60311 FRANKFURT AM MAIN
WWW.SCHIRN.DE
PROPOSALS@SCHIRN.DE”>PROPOSALS@SCHIRN.DE
CULTURE ZONE 06
5 DAYS, 5 THEMES
1216 JULY 2006 MESSE FRANKFURT, FORUM
CULTURE ZONE 06 is an international and interdisciplinary cultural conference that will take place in Frankfurt am Main from 12 to 16 July and will explore five highly charged, controversial themes in the current cultural debate over a period of five days:
12 JULY – WAVES, TRENDS, AND EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS
14 JULY – EVERYTHING THINKS, EXCEPT HUMAN BEINGS
13 JULY – GOOD-BYE, SUBCULTURE; HELLO, SUCCESS CULTURE
15 JULY – RETHINKING SPIRITUALITY: THE RETURN OF THE RELIGIOUS
16 JULY – ME, INC., VERSUS THE HOOD: THE CULTURE OF COMMUNITY
CULTURE ZONE 06 brings together various fields: a scholarly conference with lectures, debates, and presentations, a Culture Club with an extensive artistic, cinematic, and musical program, and a Childrens Base that will offer young visitors a number of workshops and projects as an opportunity to reflect on the themes discussed in the scholarly section.
CULTURE ZONE 06 is intended to be an interdisciplinary and international platform for conversations, discussions, and debates about current culture, with the goal of developing different cultural and intellectual discourses and offering a form to exchange heterogeneous approaches.
CURATOR Dr. Martina Weinhart (curator, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt) ADVISORY BOARD Prof. Michael Hagner (historian of science, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich), Prof. Thomas Macho (cultural historian and musicologist, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin),
Dr. Ulf Poschardt (writer and journalist, Berlin), Prof. Dr. Niels Werber (professor of literature, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
CALL FOR PAPERS
For the conference CULTURE ZONE 06 scholars and interested parties from all relevant fields are invited to submit proposals on the following themes:
WAVES, TRENDS, AND EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS
The ability to look into the future seems to be an unachievable desideratum. But how does one negotiate a cultural future? With the wind of modernisms fetishization of the new at its back, todays cultural production alternates between avant-garde and nostalgia, between fashions and forms of reflexivity. Is it better, as Brecht said, to line up with the bad new over the good old? The aesthetics of outdoing the past and keeping up to date found in pop and hype would seem to have come down clearly on the side of the new. What strategies can be diagnosed and analyzed against this backdrop? With what means do the various cultural agents operate?
EVERYTHING THINKS, EXCEPT HUMAN BEINGS
Id speaks is not just Sigmund Freuds assumption, which has long since been confirmed; at least since Jacques Lacan and the French poststructuralists, the reservations about a substantial ego have left behind considerable scratches on the concepts of subjectivity and human free will. Was the substantial ego a mistake? Nevertheless, it does not seem to be time for alarmism. People are doing a balancing act between autonomous structures for action and the technical extension of the self. Over the course of the twentieth century, brain research increasingly had something to say in this field. In that respect, this question, more than any other, has become an exemplary meeting point between the natural sciences and the humanities, between theoretical and empirical studies. On the other hand, prostheses have been developed that extend and displace precisely the authorities that have been stripped from the ego. Are these things a form of reprieve or rather a threat of further loss of control, an expansion of infinitely intertwined systems? What are the consequences in terms of control and responsibility?
GOOD-BYE, SUBCULTURE; HELLO, SUCCESS CULTURE
Questions of culture are always ultimately questions of the structures that constitute it. Today the idea of cultural is linked above all to the question of identity, whether it be the collective identity of a group or a concept of society as the sum of diverse, heterogeneous cultural realities. What is it that adopts cultural form here? Who participates in cultural reality? What finds acceptance and validity in culture? What form does a critique of aesthetic culture take? What cultural products determine meaning? All of this is dependent on cultural channels and fields of action, on producers and consumers of culture in the field of tension of mass society and media society, of high aesthetic culture and pop, of institutionalization in the fields of art and science, of expert authority and democratized information society. It becomes necessary to question the mechanisms of cultural transformation.
RETHINKING SPIRITUALITY: THE RETURN OF THE RELIGIOUS
We seem to encounter modernism as something almost entirely sacred, and todays postsecular society would seem to be anything but religious. And yet religion in the narrower sense seems to have become an urgent topic today, raising widely different sets of questions. On the one hand, a growing political influence of religious orthodoxies of very different faiths can be observed within an equally broad range of social models; on the other hand, naturalistic views of the world are also spreading. It becomes necessary to question more than just the meaning of politicized religion in the form of an Islamism that is prepared to use violence or that of evangelical fundamentalism in the United States. Above all, it becomes necessary to question the function of the religions and of religious communication for our society; the role of the media and of representations of increasingly religious motives, as well as the representations in a wide range of cultural segments.
ME, INC., VERSUS THE HOOD: THE CULTURE OF COMMUNITY
The concept of the community is being overworked and is looking for new descriptions. In todays culture, it has been subjected to acute polarizations. The isolation in the globalized society with its Me, Inc.s pulls it in one direction; the incantations of a mass media society in another. This section will explore the questions why communities and their defining cultures now dominate the semantics of social self-descriptions and which functions they fulfill.
PARTICIPATION
Proposals must be received by 30 April 2006 (by e-mail only): PROPOSALS@SCHIRN.DE
Length of proposal submissions: maximum of 2,000 characters (Word or PDF file, maximum of 2 MB).
Please indicate for which of the five sections you are applying. If you are not sure which section your lecture is best suited for, please indicate that.
The conference languages are German, English, and French.
The committee will decide on the selection of contributions. The decisions will be announced to all participants on 13 May 2006 by e-mail. Please refrain from inquiring about the status of your application in writing or by phone.
The organizers take no responsibility for submissions by mail. They can neither be considered nor returned.
Additional information on the conference will be available in May 2006 at WWW.SCHIRN.DE.
