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

Michael Kackman
Toward a parliamentary culture: television studies, television culture, and their publics
One of the principal contributions of cultural studies to television studies has been a rich conversation about
television’s central role in mediating and negotiating cultural identities, histories, and ideologies. In the US,
in particular, this has led to a theorization of the medium as a cultural forum, one in which dominant
discourses and representations might be confronted by a range of competing counter-publics and identities.
But while television as both industry and audience practice has changed radically in recent decades, our
central metaphors for characterizing the medium remain rooted in anachronistic models of mass publics.
Here, I discuss a range of programs that invoke issues of national culture and politics (Newsroom, US-HBO;
Borgen, Denmark-DR1, House of Cards, US-Netflix, etc.), and suggest that in the way it speaks to and for
fragmented national and international cultures, TV should be re-theorized as a kind of parliamentary cultural
practice.
Helen Wood & Jilly Boyce Kay* Reality Television Celebrity and Illegitimate Cultural Labour
This paper considers the contemporary cultural economy of reality television, and how its mobilization of
hyper-visible celebrity offers some promise of social mobility for young people in a context of widening
inequality. Moving beyond debates about representation and reality television as “poverty porn”, it
considers the limited spaces through which reality television participants become cultural workers, and the
intense forms of promotional labour in which they engage to extend and expand their media lives - often
across less formalised sites such as nightclubs, beauty salons, and social media. It also analyses the work of
publicists and agents who broker and extract value from these activities. By drawing on earlier work on
celebrity and media such as Fame Games (Turner et al, 2000), we consider both the intensification of biopolitical
labour models in the current climate, and how the figuring of this labour as illegitimate contributes
to redefinitions of classed identity.
Stuart Richards Goats, Car Curses and Back Rolls: (Quality) Reality Television and Audience Expectations.
Few reality television shows have had the longevity of Survivor. The show’s history has seen it traverse
through different stages of reality television fandom. Contemporary reality television highlights the
significant participatory culture of reality television fandom. Competitive reality television shows, such as
Survivor and RuPaul’s Drag Race, place increasing demands on their audiences’ knowledge of the text’s
history. When discussing strategy or mocking fellow contestants, competition participants will regularly refer
to previous seasons, which allows for the possibility of new modes of enjoyment for audiences. This paper
will act as a provocation to consider some of these reality television texts as quality. Quality television has
become a label to differentiate between narrative based drama series that are deemed higher quality due to
their subject matter and form. This paper will examine the audience expectations of both Survivor and
RuPaul’s Drag Race to argue that their audience expectations position them as quality reality television.
1J
Multicultural arts – practices and policies (Chair, Audrey Yue)
Rimi Khan
Multiculturalism’s new localisms: rethinking art, participation and policy
Recent decades have seen a fragmentation of the spaces of cultural participation and production. The
privatisation of the public sphere and development of new media technologies have resulted in a
pluralisation of the sites in which individuals and communities find expressions of belonging and identity.
These conflicting practices of belonging and cultural participation also mean that policy frameworks for
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