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From The New Everyday
THE NEW EVERYDAY: A PARTICIPATORY “UNCONFERENCE”
October 2, 2009, 10am-5pm
NYU Humanities Initiative (20 Cooper Square, Fifth Floor)
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About the New Everyday
Overview
This event is a concluding “unconference” to the NYU Visual Culture Working Group and its predecessors. The goal is to establish a set of small working groups on the theme of The New Everyday that will continue the project in more focused fashion.
In both visual culture and cultural studies, the everyday has been a central and motivating topic/theoretical insight. However, it is clear that the “everyday” of Michel de Certeau and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies no longer exists in quite the same way. Surveillance cameras make walking an object of police investigation, while barcodes track our shopping. Subcultures are not only commodified by the likes of MTV but actively promoted.
So this event sets out to ask: what are the terms of the new everyday, given the financial crisis, the recession, climate change, the Web 2.0 and the permanent counterinsurgency? What are the tactics of the new everyday? What methodological approaches does it imply for visual and cultural studies?
While I still like it, I think there was an mistake close to the end of the fourth paragraph.
Format
In order to generate a set of research projects on this theme, we are hosting a one-day participation event. Opening presentations of five minutes identifying a theme that could be developed as part of the project are solicited from all past members of the Visual Culture Working Groups and anyone who would like to come on board now.
Our morning session is devoted to these five minute presentations. To contribute a five minute presentation, simply add a title and brief abstract here.
After lunch, a Long Table discussion will be held bringing together different themes that have arisen. Potential working groups will break out from the Long Table, establish their topic/strategy, and then report back to the group as a whole.
One proposal coming out of the working group has been to create an online publication “between a blog and a journal” devoted to the question of The New Everyday. The site will host reportage, observation, imagery and on-the-fly theorizations of the new everyday. This project will be developed in collaboration with Media Commons
The event concludes with remarks from our keynote listener Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and author of many works including Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) and Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006).
Agenda
10.00 Introduction
10.15 5 minute presentations
12.30 Lunch
1.30 The Long Table
3.00 Keynote listener Arjun Appadurai
4.00 Reception
