The event of the year for the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory is the autumn conference – an international scientific event dedicated to general theoretical topics.

The autumn conference takes place alternately in Tallinn and Tartu, in the last weeks of October.


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University of Tartu, Estonia
October 20–22, 2011

Things in culture, cultures in things and lest we forget, all that stuff in between. Objects, artefacts and matter, even sometimes the immaterial, have been comprehensively theorised and contextualised through a number of intriguing case studies. Since the groundbreaking publication of The Social Life of Things in 1986 to the launch of the Journal of Material Culture ten years later, the material world in its cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary study could never quite be the same again. Indeed, the very concern for the effects and affects of the ways in which materiality changes over time is the one that this interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) seeks to address.

A well known adage in this field of enquiry is that things make people as much people make things. The relationships we develop and share with a tangible arena of artworks, buildings, infra-structures, monuments, relics and everyday objects varies from the remote to the intimate, from the fleeting to the durable, from immediate to mediated, from the passive to the passionate, from the philosophised to the commonsensical. Within the practices of creative processes and their use or non-use of the physical world, things gain meaning and status. They become endowed with agency, symbolism and power. Our journeys through the world of things generate a multitude of emotions: pleasure, attachment, belonging, angst, envy, exclusion, loathing and fear. They also feed into the propagation of on-going myths, narratives and discourses which oscillate between the robust and the ever shifting.

Plenary lectures
• Dr. Elizabeth Crooke (Museum and Heritage Studies, University of Ulster)
„Bullet holes bring reality“: The significance of things in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict
• Prof. Dr. Ruth-E. Mohrmann (Seminar für Volkskunde/ Europäische Ethnologie, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster) 
“Research into the history of material culture”
• Prof. Stephen H. Riggins (Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland)
“The natural order is decay: The home as an ephemeral art project”
• Dr. Joanna Sofaer (Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton)
“Pots and stories”

Key topics
(i) Dynamics – Changing of meaning, practices, functions and modality in time and space
- displaying / collecting (museums, galleries and institutions);
- archaeological practice / how objects are made meaningful through their use;
- naming and renaming; assembling and dismantling;
- modality, mediation, remediation; (sources of) knowledge of things;
- innovation and technologies;
- biographies of things / life stories;
- recycling, reuse, waste, entropy, heritage.

(ii) Identity – Ways we relate to and use things
- identification / objectification;
- memory (memorials);
- cultural autocommunication;
- symbolic usage of things – heritage, monuments, rituals;
- consumption, consumerism / commodification;
- naming, narrating and silencing (or censoring) things;
- embodiment and things.

(iii) Methodologies – How we study things
- objects and subjects of research;
- material aspects of research / materiality of research;
- disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies;
- historiographical approaches;
- what things are - genres and types of things in different disciplines;
- historical epistemologies.

Key Dates and Deadlines
Abstracts Due: June 1st, 2011
Acceptance Notification: July 1st, 2011
Registration Deadline: September 1st, 2011
Full Paper Submission: October 1st, 2011
Conference: October 20th–22nd, 2011

A conference fee is not required but there will be no reimbursement for accommodation and travel costs for conference guests (except for CECT members).

Organizers
Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (EU, European Regional Development Fund), University of Tartu, Tallinn University

Contact
Conference administrator: Monika Tasa, CECT coordinator
Email: cect@ut.ee

October 28.-30., 2010
Tartu, Estonia

This year the international autumn conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) focuses on the topic of time as a category which, in every respect, touches upon human agency and entity. Issues of past, present, future and the culture of history (time) are symptomatic to our era. This topic also enables us to intertwine the viewpoints of the different disciplines of cultural research.

The autumn conference aims at critical and reflexive discussions on the tendencies of how time functions within culture. An additional starting point would be the ways different media construct time within the framework of private, institutional, group specific, etc., interests. The points of departure for discussion would be the following interconnected aspects of the construction and representation of time/temporality:
• The mediality and intertextuality of time; specific genres of mediating time, their socio-cultural, technical, etc., development;
• Agency, private and public aspects in the production and reception of temporality; empowerment and domination in the construction of temporality;
• Institutional (museum, archive, school, church, etc.) and group specific usage of time and its means of mediation;
• The domain of the category of time in social and culture studies; the concept and discussion of time in different disciplines and approaches; how we use concepts based on time to define our objects of study, how the times on object- and meta-levels are related.

The conference is organised by the cultural communication studies, folkloristics, ethnology, religious studies and semiotics CECT research groups. However, the aim of the conference is to dislocate the established topography of the academic landscape and – focusing on the consciousness of time in culture – encourage research that leads to presentations employing the possibilities of several disciplines. Joint presentations by researchers from different research fields are preferred.

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Tallinn, Estonia

More information



November 21.-22., 2008
Hotel Barclay, Tartu

Conference language: Estonian

Program and abstracts (in Estonian)
Pictures

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