[rohrpost] conf.: Impasse? Cultures of globalization and the globalization of culture

[Claus Pias]

Impasse? Cultures of globalization and the globalization of culture

11-13 October 2007
IFK
Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Vienna

Fierce debates on globalization as a key concept imagining the world
in the 21st century are running deep in all social sciences today.
Attempts at theorizing space and place go hand in hand with a far
reaching critique of mainstream social thought and knowledge,
particularly the idée fixe of self-containedness and territorial
enclosure of societies, communities, and cultures. It is this
“spatial turn” in combination with the radical shift of analytical
attention from stasis to mobility that define the main issues of
quotidian globalization discourse.
Although range and deep structure of the ongoing processes of socio-
spatial reconfiguration are highly controversial, a few common
features can be discerned.
In conceptualizing the transnationalization of commodities and
people, of financial and cultural markets, of loyalties and
collective identities, globalization theories share at least two
basic assumptions. They usually construct two separate territorial
logics by differentiating a global “space of flows” from a more
traditionally located “space of places”, and they break with the
longstanding and foundational isomorphism between territoriality,
identity, and culture. These hypotheses converge into the basic
question: the question of new modes of the spatial organization of
social relations in particular and sociation in general.
“Cultures of Globalization and the Globalization of Culture(s)”
serves as a shortcut into major conceptual problems as well as
paradoxical outcomes of what might be called cultural globalization.
Explorations into three contested heartlands of globalization – the
global-local interplay, the homogenization-heterogenization paradigm,
and the topics of territoriality and de-territorialization shall
offer profound insights into where we stand in the global here and
now. The meaning of “impasse”, however, varies from “hopelessness” to
“blind alley” to “stand off”.

Thursday, October 11, 2007, Venue: IFK

14.00 Address of Welcome
Helmut Lethen
Introduction
Helmuth Berking

Chair: Rolf Lindner
CONCEPTUALIZING GLOBAL CULTURES
14.30 Ulf Hannerz
Theorizing cultural globalization: where we stand
15.30 Anna Wessely
National tradition and globalization
16.30 Coffee Break
17.00 John Tomlinson
Global immediacy
18.00 End

Friday, October 12, 2007, Venue: IFK

Chair: Helmuth Berking
SPACE, PLACE, CULTURE
9.30 David Morley
The geography of modernity
10.30 Michael A. Crang
The shape we’re in: spatial imaginaries of globalization
11.30 Coffee Break
12.00 Jonathan Friedman
Local globalities
13.00 Lunch Break

Chair: Martina Löw
ARCHITECTURE, URBANISM, AND THE POSTCOLONIAL
15.00 Rob Shields
Urban cultures and globalization
16.00 Coffee Break
16.30 Anthony King
More of the same or something new?
Architecture, built environments, and representations in space  
debates on cultural globalization
17.30 Jyoti Hosagrahar
Urban melancholy: reconciling global modernities and local identities
18.30 End

Saturday, October 13, 2007, Venue: IFK

Chair: Claus Pias
TRAVELLING IMAGES AND THE POWER OF VISION
9.30 Heike Behrend
Visual media, global flow and closure: politics of images in Mombasa/ 
Kenya
10.30 Purnima Mankekar
Unsettling India: impersonation, mobility, identity in an era of  
transnational media
11.30 Coffee Break
12.00 Mark. B. Hansen
Global time, global media?
13.00 End