Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

content, data visualisations and the media “message”; and thick data where the politics of the digital are
enmeshed in socio-cultural mediations and conceptions. This is not a dichotomy, but a complex interweaving
of practice and perception that is gendered, “unthought” and reflexive; individual and institutional: part of
the complexity and embeddedness of data in our everyday. It is this that needs critical attention if we are to
understand the politics of data and its’ impact across cultures, subcultures and institutions for the future.
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Filmic engagement with contemporary political culture (Chair, Paul Kelaita)
Stephen Chan Un-imagining the Local/Future: Filmic Engagement with the Absence of Hope
As the world and the neighbourhood we live in are progressively mediated and de-localised, globalization
drives commodity-, information- and ideology-flows to multifarious interface and complex engagement with
individualised differences. Whereas a politics of the local emerges in contemporary Hong Kong through
various embodiments of critique clustering around hopelessness as its intellectual core, the recent
convergence of “localist” discourses foreshadows contradictions in the upsurge of antagonism. (See special
issue edited by Stephen Chan entitled “Hong Kong at a crossroads”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3,
September 2015, 327-494.) In face of such a deep crisis, we need to critically unpack the constraints and
possibilities of the de-localised orientations for our specific contemporary society. As identities are made
and inscribed in discourses and practices heavily embedded in locally emergencies and constantly take shape
in the process of multiple on-site cultural-political constructions, I want to examine the formation of
“locality” and re-think the making of local “subjects” as key players in the contemporary crisis. We could ask:
to what extent would concepts such as the “constitutive other” (S. Hall, J. Butler), or locality as a “structure
of feeling” (R. Williams, A. Appadurai), help us understand the worldly practices and appreciate the
existential problems people face today? Is the local an alternative to the global and the national alike? Is it to
be taken as the antagonist or accomplice of the other, with which the subject of cultural crisis must struggle?
What are the power dynamics at play and the moral engagements thus engendered? Confronted by the
challenges facing post-1997 Hong Kong, this paper provides the contexts of the latest filmic engagement
with the local, which mediates the absence of hope in its future imagination, and poses the subject of
dissent as a question for the re-invention of social cohesion. With reference to the 2014 Umbrella
Movement and Hong Kong’s uncertain fate come 2047, I shall examine the social imaginary that enables one
to un-think, indeed to un-imagine, the cultural future of those inhabiting the locality. Films to be examined
include commercial films, independent documentary films, as well as short films on the internet.
Eleni Varmazi
Being Weird in contemporary Greek Cinema
Although contemporary Greek directors themselves do not accept that there is such a movement as The
Greek Weird Movement, the term has come to be established on an international level by film critics and
theoreticians. It is obvious that films like Dogtooth (2009), Attenberg (2010), Homeland (2010), L (2011) Miss
Violence (2013) and other share a common criticism for the “System” and deal with the Greek financial
recession on a secondary level. These films are also characterized by physical and psychological violence,
language games, absurdity and changes of established meanings. They deal with contemporary issues, a fact
that really contrasts the past history of Greek Cinema. The proposed paper is going to examine how
contemporary Greek cinema after 2008 emerges with a different style, thematic concerns and creative modi
operandi, which are connected to the Greek financial crisis.
Mehdi Derfoufi The “jeune cinéma français” of the 1990-2000 decade versus postcolonial ethnicities and French-
Maghrebi cinema
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