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

to maintaining existing social roles and past traditions that are a common underlying feature of advertising.
This raises questions of male self-identity and its management in a multi-media world.
Stephen Papson
Representing Corporate Capitalism in Advertising Discourse
Over the past two decades the commercials of global corporations have become pervasive. They have
migrated from business and news channels to sports and entertainment channels and spread from national
to international audiences. Using a data set of over 1500 commercials that aired between 1995 and the
present this paper addresses how Capital constructs itself in advertising discourse, that is how corporate
advertising represents its own infrastructure. Although any particular commercial may serve a branding or
legitimatizing function, taken collectively these representations “reflect,” though in a distorted way, how
capital works. Two themes will be discussed: how these commercials present a fully integrated global
network in which information and commodities flow at highly accelerated rates through a friction-free
network, and how these commercials reinforce the grand narrative that links capital investment and
technological development to unending human progress by celebrating universal humanism as the ethos of
corporate practice. Although these commercials present a utopian morphology of Capital, they also
construct a cultural formation that hovers over and legitimizes the practices associated with Corporate
Capitalism.
9U
Representation and contestation (Chair, Joanna Iranowska)
Nico Carpentier*, Vaia Doudaki* & Yiannis Christidis
contestation and agonism
Exhibiting conflict: Looking at an exhibition as a site of
In November 2015, a photo exhibition on statues and commemoration sites in Cyprus, and their echoes of
the Cyprus Problem (the 41-year long division of the island), took place in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. It
then moved to Limassol, where it was displayed at the NeMe Arts Centre, for three weeks in January-
February 2016. The exhibition was entitled “Iconoclastic Controversies. A visual sociology of statues and
commemoration sites in the southern regions of Cyprus”. The exhibited corpus of 20 photographs, taken by
one of the presenters, Nico Carpentier during a research stay in Cyprus in 2013-2014, dealt with a very
political-ideological theme. It was an academic reflection on how statues and commemoration sites narrate
and frame the Cyprus Problem, and how they in many cases contain references to the “Self” and the “Other”
by presenting a heroic “self” to the “own” community, or by showing the suffering of the “self”. But the
exhibition also investigated how some (exceptional) statues undermine this representation of the “self” and
offer a different narrative of the conflict, and the identities of the people involved
(http://nicocarpentier.net/icontroversies/). As part of the exhibition, and in order to stimulate further
dialogue, three seminars, open to the public, were organised by partner NGOs during the period of the
exhibitions, inviting speakers and audiences “to reflect about the role of history, memory and identity in
Cyprus”. The exhibition, which will be the centre of our study, is defined as a medium on its own merits. The
paper (and the exhibition) are framed by the principles of action research (Reason and Bradbury, 2001;
Dickens and Watkins, 1999), and our analysis will be grounded in, firstly, a qualitative textual analysis of the
photos and the exhibitions, and of the discussions, writings and broadcasts about the exhibition. Secondly, a
participant observation during the exhibitions and the seminars will also be used. Through this combination
of methods, we will examine, both at the material and the discursive level, how an event about
representations of conflict contributes to conflict transformation. With a theoretical framework driven by
Mouffe’s (2013) work on agonism, the paper will investigate whether and how the exhibition is agonistically
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