[URBANTH-L]
the CES conference/call for contributors to the panel on
consumption
Neringa Klumbyte
nekst4 at pitt.edu
Mon May 21 20:23:02 EDT 2007
We invite contributions to the panel "Consumer Regimes and Cultures in the
Enlarged Europe" for the Council for European Studies Conference which will
take place in Chicago, March 6-8, 2008. We welcome paper proposals from
scholars and graduate students who conduct research in the new member
states of the European Union: namely, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic,
Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland,Romania, Slovakia, and
Slovenia.
Please send an abstract of 250 words by May 29, 2007 to Neringa Klumbyte
(<mailto:nekst4 at pitt.edu>nekst4 at pitt.edu) or Yuson Jung
(<mailto:yusonjung at post.harvard.edu>yusonjung at post.harvard.edu).
Consumer Regimes and Cultures in the Enlarged Europe
Consumption studies in post-socialist and post-EU enlargement contexts
illuminate the ways in which individuals are vested not only with juridical
competences, obligations, and entitlements (or lack of them) bestowed by
the state, but also with particular modes of status, authority, prestige,
and power endowed by the market. Moreover, consumption is an arena where
interests, ideologies, and practices of the markets, states, and the EU
collide and collude. In these intersecting spaces, producers, lobbyists,
state officials, and policy makers as well as consumers rearticulate and
recirculate identities, values, and meanings to create political and
economic orders.
This panel explores the dynamics of consumer regimes and consumer cultures
of the new member states which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. Rather than
privileging either the EU, the state, or the market, it attends to the
interchanges among them, and how they influence consumer citizenship
broadly defined. The papers in the panel investigate how consumption is
involved in the making of subjectivities and public identities, shaping
sociability, belonging, tastes, needs, and desires, editing official state
and EU ideologies, trans/national histories and geopolitical orders.
"Europeanization" and the formation of the EU market necessarily involve
processes of domestication of the EU-wide consumption regimes. By
renegotiating neoliberal values and engagements of the enlarged EU, the
various local consumers remake Europe as Europe remakes them.
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