Practices of Distribution and the Reconfiguration of Culture

• Organizers: Vinzenz Hediger, Matthias Krings, Stefan Schmid, Cornelia Storz.

CrossArea e.V. was founded in Leipzig in 2014 as a result of an initiative for stronger and long-term cooperation between BMBF-funded area studies centers and networks with corresponding university and non-university institutes. This association sees itself as an umbrella organization of research institutions, projects and undertakings active in Area Studies. Together with the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung (Bonn), it curates the discussion platform Trafo trafo.hypotheses.org, on which news, contributions and event announcements as well as research results from the field of transregional studies are published. The goal of CrossArea e.V. is to give a voice to the common concerns of Area Studies, which are organized in such diverse ways, in order to expand the radius of action and intensify networking.

The Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Afrikastudien (ZIAF), the Interdisziplinäre Zentrum für Ostasienstudien (IZO), the research initiative “ConTrust – Trust and Conflict. Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty” at the research center Normative Orders, and “CEDITRAA – Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia (www.ceditraa.net)” at Goethe Universität Frankfurt together with the Georg Foster Zentrum at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz are hosting the 2024 CrossArea conference in Frankfurt titled “Practices of Distribution and the Reconfiguration of Culture”.

For most of the post-WW II period the debate about culture centered on notions of hegemony and “cultural imperialism”. The focus was on the global dominance of the United States and what the Frankfurt School described as the “culture industries”, commercial entities producing commodified forms of culture and experience at the expense and exclusion of regional and local varieties.

But more recently, the emergence of digital technologies appears to have introduced a new dynamic into the organization of cultural spaces and flows, to the point where some observers announce the dawn of a “New World Order of Cultural Production”. However, cultural production and culture more broadly speaking are ultimately shaped by distribution, i.e. the pathways through which cultural expressions reach audiences (and through which audiences respond to, and thus shape cultural production in turn). Any analysis of a recalibration of cultural spaces and flows will have to start with an analysis of the infrastructures, formats and institutions of distribution.

Taking the paradigmatic status of cultural production and cultural flows for the contemporary transformations in area studies as its starting point, the CrossArea symposium 2024 discusses the challenges of the study of practices of distribution in an interdisciplinary perspective.

Please find the preliminary program in annex.

If you are interested to attend the conference, please write to Stefan Schmid at s.schmid@em.uni-frankfurt.de until 31 October 2024.

There is no conference fee but space is limited so registration is mandatory.