Celebrity Culture and Power - Between Culture and Politics
Nordic Celebrity Studies Network organizes workshop 2016 and announces call for abstracts.
Confirmed keynotes
Professor Richard Dyer, King’s College London
Professor Hillevi Ganetz, Stockholm University
Celebrity culture is ubiquitous in media culture today. Whereas the modern celebrity culture begins in the Hollywood film industry with the star system as a kind of matrix for the representation of fame (Dyer), the notion of charismatic authority started out as characterisation of the institutions of power (Weber; Marshall). Celebrity has become a cultural and political logic by which visibility, attention and recognition is distributed (van Krieken). The connection between the political and the cultural within celebrity culture has proven to be central for how we understand politics as well as cultural authority in the media. Celebrity culture has been taken up in the diverse fields of international relations like development studies, humanitarianism and postcolonial studies. Additionally celebrity culture addresses important issues of identity, gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity. Thus the study of celebrity culture is interesting and productive to address within a wide range of approaches and disciplines within film and media research.
About the network and workshop target group
We would like to stress that this Nordic Celebrity Studies Network is about connecting researchers with an interest in celebrity culture from both film and media studies and cultural studies, social sciences and gender studies. Even though this is a Nordic network the object of study is not restricted to research concerning Nordic celebrities or celebrity culture in the Nordic countries. The workshop is for researchers based in the Nordic countries doing research on celebrity culture.