1 Jussi Turtiainen, Miia Lähde, Elina Kokkoniemi-Haapanen (eds.) Distributor University of Tampere Bookshop TAJU P.O. Box 617, 33014 University of Tampere Finland Tel. +358 3 215 6055 Fax + 358 3 215 7685 taju@uta.fi ISBN 951-44-5393-X ISSN 0359-8144 Fourth International Conference SESSION ABSTRACTS Series B:40 2002 Department of Sociology and Social Psychology University of Tampere, Finland 2-SA-34 Achievements, Obstacles, and Exemplars in Audience Research Organiser: Melissa Click As research into the power and infl uence of media consumption has become more sophisticated, debates in popular culture about media’s infl uence over viewers have remained relatively crude. In these debates, violent, sexual and discriminatory behaviors are repeatedly linked directly to media content. Media messages are superfi cially held accountable for some of society’s most troubling and complex problems. While these accusations contain truth, they bypass a more complex understanding of the ways in which meaning is created between media messages and media audiences. Under what constraints do audiences make meaning out of media messages? How does one measure media infl uence? What responsibilities do media researchers have to the their participants and society in general? Cultural studies has consistently provided a framework blending theory, method and activism to guide scholars dedicated to examining the intricacies of media infl uence. This panel invites papers raising questions, suggesting alternative frameworks and goals, and providing exemplars about audience research. Agency, Differences and New Technologies Organisers: Päivi Eriksson and Marja Vehviläinen The session examines the interconnection of agency and new information and communication technologies/media in the context of people’s everyday life practices and interpretations. It brings together studies of various groups ranging, for example, from mobile phone users and rural and local information society developers to disabled children. It aims to articulate the social differences (e.g. locality, gender, age) that organise the use and the development of the new technologies and the technology related practices. Various social differences intertwine with one and another in people’s practices and the session explores how the intertwining differences shape the agency related to new technologies. It presents perspectives and interpretations of various groups of people to discuss the social and cultural construction of agency in the technically mediated society. 2-PK-55 Agency, Differences and New Technologies -- Everyday Practices 2-PK-67 Agency, Differences and New Technologies -- Refl ecting Networks of Agency 3-B-75 Arctic Youth Research - Challenges and Visions Organisers: Anne Tuhkunen and Veli-Matti Ulvinen Under the theme of Youth Culture the session is seeking the broad cultural understanding of the living conditions and life situations of the young people in northern parts of the globe. Arctic Youth Research can be seen as an umbrella venture to grasp the northern life experiences of the youth and through comparative discussions of research fi ndings develop a better and comprehensive cultural understanding of the old and new, traditional, modern, post and late modern walks of life of the rising generations in the north. One point of view is the setting of local conditions and emerging globalisation, and the other is the geographical setting of centre- periphery that may have a tremendous impact on the life experiences of the youth in the north. And there might be some other powerful factors too. Then, what are the challenges we should meet with and visions we should be able to realize to make this effort worthy? 4 1-A1-2 Audiovisual Images in Cultures of Historical Memory: The Case of War as ”Modernist Event” Organiser: Drehli Andreas Robnik Recent theoretical and analytical work in fi lm and media studies has stressed the contribution of cinema and television to the formation of cultural memories with regard to historical events and their aftermath. Hayden White´s concept of the ”modernist event” refers to a contemporary history which is thoroughly archived in (audio)visual images, while at the same time debates about meanings and narrativizations of ”what happened” can hardly be set at rest. The paradigmatic status of war as modernist event is accompanied by notions of war as media event, highlighting live coverage as well as TV documentaries and cinematic reconstructions of the past as mass- cultural ”lieux de mémoire”. Traumatic retroactivity, prosthetic memory, media geopolitics or fi ctional revision of national history are among the research paradigms in circulation. This panel will focus on the experience and remembrance of war in audiovisual images, ranging from global information networks and TV historiography to Hollywood movies and cinematic essays. Author ©: Intellectual Property and Contemporary Authorship Sessions Organiser: Alana Lowe-Petraske At the intersection of aesthetic authorship and legal rights ownership lies a fertile knot of ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics, cultural politics and techno-econimics. This session aims to engage with the fi ssures, overlaps, and ambiguities of authorship in contemporary, globalised economic and technological environments. Paper engage with authorship/ownership in music, literature, or the visual arts through various cultural mediations: legal structures, technology, globalisation processes, identitarian politics, stances of anonymity and resistance, etc. Key issues will concern collaborative/multiple authorship, author/rights-owner divergence, the ethics and rhetoric of piracy, passivity/activity in consumption, reception of intellectual property discourse in the popular media, among others. The goal for this session to create an environment for exchange and lively debate on authorship the practical realities of intellectual and artistic property in our global moment and to open up this compelling area to interdisciplinary inquiry. 2-R-50 Author ©: Intellectual Property and Contemporary Authorship I 2-R-62 Author ©: Intellectual Property and Contemporary Authorship II 3-P3-105 Beneath Representation Organiser: Tiziana Terranova This panel explores some of the issues relating to the current centrality given to notions of representation within cultural and media studies. The notion that the media shape the social by constructing its meaning through representation is an established textbook argument throughout the fi eld. This centrality given to meaning/signifi cation/representation, however, is in urgent need of re-assessment. The panel questions and contextualises this emphasis of representation in the context of the structuralist legacy of semiotic approaches to the relationship between language and reality and explores alternative approaches to culture, the body and the media and their implications for research and teaching in the fi eld. 5 1-PK-32 Beyond Master and Slave: Modernity’s Chinese Connection or Chinese-ness’s Modern Connection Organiser: Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao Chinese culture’s encounter with modernity has been typically interpreted either as anathema or panacea. The mythifi ed interpretations of this encounter all originate from that founding myth: that Chinese culture is dated and western culture destined to rule. The postcolonialist effort to de-colonize nevertheless seems to have left intact this myth, what Johannes Fabian calls temporal ”non-coevalness,” which denies the possibility of what I would call the ”revitalizability” of indigenous cultures that have been sidelined into the position of the other by (Western) modernity, and ensures the eventual wholesale Westernization. While the overrated strategy of mimicry produces at best ”re-localization” of Western cultural infl uences, there exists yet another alternative that has been aiming at a ”revitalization” of indigenous cultures. The two processes appearing to coincide, the former simply carries on the colonialist project under the optimistic guise of the ”global/local” dialogic whereas the latter indeed strives toward a true vindication of ”coevalness.” Bodies, Technology, Aesthetics Sessions Organiser: Melanie Swalwell While the alleged disembodiment of cyberspace has featured prominently in discourses about newer technologies, the aesthetic experiences facilitated by these media have also generated considerable interest amongst promoters, users and cultural theorists. 2-A1-47 Bodies, Technology, Aesthetics: New Engagements, New Possibilities? While relations with technology are frequently portrayed as thoroughly unaesthetic, asensual, panellists in this session are concerned to refl ect on and move beyond some of the limits of such models of engagement. From modern artists’ concerns with various types of moving bodies, to the interactions between sentient bodies in and across a range of different spaces and new technological environments (including the gallery, games space, wired theatrical space), to contemporary refl ections on the politics of im/materiality, this panel will present current research on these engagements, and discuss the challenges that aesthetic accounts pose for thinking the subject. 2-A1-59 Bodies, Technology, Aesthetics: New Imag(in)ings Far from becoming irrelevant or ‘invalid’, bodies continue to be important in encounters with technology. Panellists in this session work at the juncture of technology, aesthetics and embodiment. Papers investigate intersections between different technologies, the ways that historical conceptions of