CFP: The Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture
Modes of Mobility: Popular Culture in an Age of Technology

To build on the success of the First Annual Ray Browne Conference, and usher in the fortieth year of the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green State University, the Popular Culture Scholars Association at BGSU would like to invite any and all students (undergraduates and graduate), scholars, critics, former members of the POPC program and friends of the department to join us for the Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture to be held February 8 through February 10, 2013, on the campus of Bowling Green State University.

Dr. Ray Browne founded the department of Popular Culture to give students an opportunity to academically consider the cultural forms of their everyday lives. In the past forty years, popular culture has only grown more prominent in society and developed new ways of engaging the public. Popular culture has become increasingly mobile through smart phones, webisodes, memes, and social media blurring the boundaries between producers and consumers. Simultaneously, cultures in general have become increasingly mobile through the spread of and contact between peoples, ideas and technology; making the production and consumption of culture a truly transnational affair. In light of increased cultural mobility made possible by new modes of technology, we must consider how popular culture scholarship has grown (and can continue to grow) to accommodate such new cultural modalities.

Potential topics for papers, panels, and roundtable proposals include, but are not limited to:

• How has the increased mobility in terms of culture, people, and technology had an effect on appropriation of cultures, (anti)nationalism, social and political change, tourism, diasporic experiences and how do we begin to theorize these interactions?
• How do we reimagine/reconstruct literatures, languages, narratives and identities in cyber societies?
• Has transmedia and convergence culture shaped our interaction with popular texts and affected pop cultural narratives?
• How has new media shaped interactions between popular culture and individuals?
• With increasing shifts in culture, have there been similar shifts in the representation of disabled, gender, sexual, race, and ethnic identities?
• How have these shifts altered the study popular culture, and how do we continue to explore them?
• Explorations of specific popular culture texts, genres, trends and approaches

The deadline for proposals is Friday, November 16, 2012. Individual paper proposals should be between 300-400 words. Full rountable and panel theme proposals can be longer, but should include as much prospective information about the topic and number of possible participants as possible. Please email your abstract and a short biography to bgpcsa@gmail.com. The subject line should contain the writer's surname followed by "BCPC13" Abstract. Notifications for decisions will be sent by Friday, December 15, 2012. Please contact PCSA if you have any questions or concerns at bgpcsa@gmail.com or via our website at www.bgsu.orgsync.com/org/pcsa.