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

collection, Melbourne University Press 2009), Alter-Politics (Melbourne University Press 2015) and Are
Racists Responsible for Global Warming? (Forthcoming, Polity Press 2016).
Abstract:
“Lenticularity: On the Entanglement of Realities”
A lenticular is an image that appears differently depending on how you look at it. Think of the
granulated postcards that change images depending on the angle from which they are seen: smiling
face/frowning face, Harbour Bridge/Opera House, Jesus/Mary. In contrast with the single
image/reality captured in the common photograph the lenticular surface contains a multiplicity of
images/realities that reveal themselves perspectively. It should be stressed that the lenticular
surface does not offer one image that looks differently according to how you look at it, it contains
many (usually two and sometimes three) images/realities that only come forth from a particular
perspective in the process of encountering the surface. In this paper based on ethnographic
material on the culture of the Lebanese diaspora and the world of indigenous Australians, I want to
argue against an unreflexively assumed mono-realism that social and cultural analysis takes as a
default position. Instead I want to argue that social subjects are always faced with a lenticular
multi-ontological world, with what Lucien Levy-Bruhl calls ‘l’enchevêtrement des réalités”, the
entanglement of realities.
Ben Highmore (University of Sussex), Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of
Sussex. He is currently working on the relationships between taste, retailing, urbanism, art and design, and
domestic life as part of a major research fellowship for the Leverhulme Trust. His most recent books are
Culture: Key Ideas in Media and Cultural Studies (Routledge 2016) and The Great Indoors: At Home in the
Modern British House (Profile Books 2014). His book The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe
in 1950s Britain is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Abstract:
“Small Worlds, Big Cities (Urban Poetics and Uneven Developments)”
In this paper I return to 1964, the year that the term “gentrification” was first coined by the
innovative urban sociologist Ruth Glass. Glass saw gentrification as neither an exacerbation of
“class cleavages” nor their overcoming; rather she saw it as part of an urban process that resulted
in “the superimposition of a criss-cross web of social divisions, which has as yet been hardly
recognized”. In many ways Glass spent her career trying to recognise these complex webs of social
divisions (she was an early exponent of the critical study of ethnic “zoning” in urban space) and the
way that they obscured social power. At the same time that Glass was writing, a major experiment
in social housing was being rolled-out across most major urban conglomerations across the globe:
the high-rise housing block and its attendant support systems (or lack of them). The 1960s also
witnessed a number of urban experiments “from below”: communes, squatting, community action.
In retrospect the 1960s look like it established many of the terms for future urban developments,
yet this moment of flourishing innovations in urban creativity (on both a large scale and on much
smaller scales) today is often looked at as a critical and social failure. What can be reclaimed from
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