The Manchester Institute for Popular Culture was set up in 1991 as an interdisciplinary body within the Faculty of Law and Humanities. It reflected our concern that the study of popular culture had reached an impasse; that it was taken seriously by the academic world insofar as it was shunted off to that strange offshoot of English Literature and Sociology - Cultural Studies.
The Institute wanted to open up popular cultural studies to the debates raging in other disciplines; and to open these to the profound transformations taking place within popular culture. We began by looking at what was happening on our doorstep; trying to grasp the developments and to understand them in terms of those actually involved in their production and consumption. We did not want to confer a spurious respectability on the objects and desires of popular culture by a transposition of register and a display of intellectual pyrotechnics which could only bestow a lucrative unrespectability on this 'transgressive' academic voice.
We started with rave, football and urban regeneration: the death of youth culture coinciding with a huge explosion of energy, imagination, irony, Peace, Love and drugs; death on the terraces somehow prompting a re-invention of what it is to be in love with a game; the shiny happy buildings of a regenerated centre, announcing that the devastation of the city was just a bad dream - and then people taking them at their word and making the centre their own.
We at the Institute felt that nobody was writing about this. As is so often the case we have since found others who thought the same. Hopefully some will be at this conference.
This is a conference where we will question the boundaries and formats of popular cultural expression, how popular cultures in the city and across the media are questioning the assumptions of the mainstream and re-drawing the notions both of the popular and of culture. Culture, creativity and change seem to us to capture the dynamic essence of the popular at the fin de siecle, evoking both an expression of will and the protean energy present within it.
Economy and culture are globalising. Cities and those who live in them must now step out from the nation state into a world where innovation and creativity, the knowledge and commitment of the local population, will be crucial. Where does popular culture fit into this, and why are its energies so unused, so wasted? In a world of rapid change, of open futures, why do we feel grey and anxious?
Can popular culture be about putting our fate into our own hands? Or do we all have to move to Prague or Berlin - or rave on a beach until it's time to come home and get a futile job? Can meaningful popular expression be found through the video, TV or film screen? Will new technologies bring emancipation or further segregation of the information rich and the information poor? Will popular cultures slip the regulatory noose and create new possibilities for consumption? Will disordered and deregulated 'wild zones' open up new spaces for urban culture and creativity?
During this, the First Annual International Conference for Popular Culture, plenary speakers who include Bernice Martin, Dan Baron Cohen, Rob Shields and Justin O Connor will engage with these and other pressing debates within popular culture. Academics will be positioned alongside practitioners from the field in a unique, difficult and potentially exciting format.
If you feel that popular culture matters then you must attend this conference.
S H O U T S F R O M T H E S T R E E T
S H O U T S F R O M T H E S T R E E T
Plenary Speakers included:
JUSTIN O'CONNOR
DAN BARON COHEN
BERNICE MARTIN
ROB SHIELDS
together with practitioners from the field.