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

shifting focus from conceptualising data as ‘knowledge’ per se and instead focus on what and how people
learn through their experience of data and how these learning cultures can be understood in a wider
pedagogical context.
3L
Knowledge production, boundary crossing and difference (Chair, Anna Hickey-Moody)
Rob Garbutt
Paying attention in others’ worlds
Cultural studies research that develops as research with others rather than as research about, often evokes
ontological politics between the worldviews of the researcher and those the researcher is with. How does
one chart a path when one experiences the intrusion of world of beings that demand a cooperative and
creative response? The path taken here first dwells on Isabel Stengers’ (2015, 57-66) urging to respond to
the intrusion of other worlds by relearning to pay attention, even to remake our ways of paying care-full
attention. To this end Bruno Latour’s (2013) exploration of modes of existence is useful. Latour provides a
cultural researcher such as myself, who is steeped in Western empiricism, a palette of modes of existing that
extends my depleted ontological landscape, and that in turn resensitises the possibilities for paying
attention. This enables one to attend in ways that don’t require re-forming the world of others in the shape
of one’s own. Such considerations are illustrated through co-researching Aboriginal heritage and human
remains.
Helen Fordham Translating Difference: The function of the public intellectual in a globalised world
Globalisation has destabilised the structures, ideologies and power relations that have traditionally
scaffolded the function of the western public intellectual. The impact of these shifts was made visible in a
series of media polls held in the first decade of the 21st century which specifically sought intellectuals who
spoke across borders. The poll results revealed the expanded and mediatised nature of the intellectual’s
contemporary public engagements and made evident the way in which the entity of the public intellectual
can be deployed by power to legitimate particular geopolitical perspectives. This paper invokes these polls in
order to consider the role of the public intellectual in a globalised world. It argues that despite the shifts that
have enabled a plurality of intellectual performances, the function of the intellectual remains unchanged: it
continues to foster community through the public debate that seeks to hold power accountable. Yet, despite
the constancy of this function, it is also clear that the entity takes part in a broader process of public
intellectualism not as an authority but as an interpreter, translator and negotiator of differences.
Cecilia Ferm Almqvist Cross roads, crossing borders, and meetings in the common world; a sociological
phenomenological view on cross boundary research – Spotify as a case
The presentation will enlighten and discuss the need and challenges of border-crossing research, when
complex phenomena that include art, technology and Bildung are to be investigated. A developing project
Evolving Bildung in the nexus of streaming services, art and users - Spotify as a case will function as a
starting-point for a reasoning regarding what constitutes border-crossing research, and what dilemmas as
well as new meeting points that appear in a process where border crossing is at stake. Material to make an
analysis possible was gathered during a lunch-to-lunch symposium where scholars from music education,
musicology, psychology, media and communication, English literature, management, Big-data, and sound
engineering met and discussed collaboration in relation to the mentioned project. The material was analyzed
from a sociological phenomenological perspective. The result of the analysis shows the challenges with, and
importance of, meetings in the common world to make border-crossing research possible, at the same time
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