[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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