Abstract sumission deadline is now extended to May 15th, 2017

submission via email: cpch.notice@eduhk.hk (Mr. Manni Cheung, Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, The Education University of Hong Kong)

The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities and the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce The Third International Conference on Popular Culture and Education, which will take place in Hong Kong, July 20th-22nd, 2017.

Popular culture as a field is full of contradictions. It is a crucible where diverse cultural products, dimensions and styles are tested with fire and turned into amalgams of classic/avant-garde, high/low, beautiful/ugly, innocent/obscene, correct/incorrect, polite/vulgar, useful/wasteful, wisdom/ignorance; core/margin; and, formal/informal. Popular culture has always been a hotbed of controversies, yet forged the progress of civilizations in every époque. Among the many controversies and contradictions, this Conference aims to examine the educational dimension of popular culture. 

There is no denying that we constantly learn something through both in-class education and out-of-class informal learning practices; meanwhile, it is extremely difficult for us to imagine a life without media and popular culture. We incorporate films, television shows, music videos into our classrooms; we teach young students who are deeply invested in cultural products manufactured by culture industries; and we, our students and other media users constantly acquire knowledge and cultural capital, construct and negotiate identities, enrich our lives and develop multiliteracies from local, regional and global popular cultures. Regardless of our own investment in popular culture, it is ubiquitous and we constantly learn through, with and against popular culture.

We cannot afford to ignore the relation between popular culture and education. This conference, thus, is a direct response to the increasingly crucial entanglements between what we consume and produce in popular culture and how we learn, teach and change through these experiences. The conference welcomes submissions from a broad range of topics that generate new ways of thinking and understanding the relation between popular culture and education: from film, television, literary, digital media and theatre studies through to education, psychology, sociology, politics, and business studies.

We invite abstracts for individual 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels of 3 x 20-minute papers on any topic related to the conference theme. Proposals for workshops on popular culture and education are also welcome

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Professor David Buckingham (Loughborough University)
• Professor Paul Booth (DePaul University)

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Pop ‘waves’, hybridization and homogenization
• Comparing global ‘X’-Pops (Canto Pop, K-Pop, J-Pop, etc.)
• Fandom and Celebrity Studies
• YouTube Studies
• Game Studies­
• E-learning and digital cultures
• Multiliteracies, multimedia and multiculturalism
• Learning through, for, and against Pop
• Education policies on ‘Pop-youth’
• Life Education and informal learning
• Pop discourse and cyberspace
• Pop, creative and cultural industries
• Pop culture and copyright laws
• Justice and ‘subversion’ of counter-Pop-cultures
• “Pop politics” – politicizing Pop/ popularizing politics
• LGBT Studies in education/”queering” classrooms
• Intersections of social media, social identity and education

Deadline for abstracts: May 8th, 2017 (300 words, plus a brief biography)

Successful abstracts will be notified by: May 15th, 2017

Please send all enquiries/abstracts to: cpch.notice@eduhk.hk