[Reader-list] [Announcements] Reminder - Call for Abstracts: Language, Culture , Urban Publics Workshop

[The Sarai Programme]

Call for Abstracts:

Workshop: Language, Culture and Urban Publics: April 1st -3rd, 2004.

This workshop will engage in a dialogue between research into histories of
print cultures and the new linguistic practices in contemporary media and
urban spaces. The workshop is intended to revisit the debates on identity
and politics together with attention to forms from magazines to cassettes to
films and television as well as new performative spaces such as call centers
discussion-lists and chat rooms. Our premise is that these dialogues would
provide diverse critical vantage points from which to engage with issues of
language and culture as they enable various strategies of dwelling in and
imagining the city. Older forms of expression in print and speech have been
under significant pressure in the contemporary with the emergence of
electronic communication, leading to both innovation and anxiety. The
workshop will focus on content, form, styles and circulation of linguistic
cultures. The primary focus will be on South Asia, though we welcome
proposals on other regions that provide a comparative perspective. While the
focus of the workshop is the contemporary transformations, it would perhaps
be useful to see the contemporary as the contested site of continuity as well
discontinuity.

Suggested Themes:
Histories of urban print cultures - Popular print forms: pamphlets, 'pulp
fiction', little magazines and small towns.
Urban imaginaries in literary cultures.
Radio and Broadcasting: 'National language' and local publics, contemporary
FM cultures.
Print and the challenge of contemporary media forms: television, mobile, SMS,
hybrid forms, copy culture.
Music: cassette cultures, regional and migrant music, parody.
Styles of Engagement: Accents, idioms, slang, performative speech and
identity: from the streets to chat rooms to Call Centres.
Speech as Sales pitch: advertisement, propaganda, and bazaar language.
Language as Politics
Poetics of Adaptation



Please send 200-300 word abstracts to language at sarai.net by February 15th,
2004..

We will cover travel and board of South Asian participants who are selected
to present at the workshop. In the case of international presenters we will
cover all local costs, in rare cases of people without institutional
support we might support travel.

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