The International Keynote Speaker will be Associate Professor Jim Collins, School of Film, Television and Theater at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana and author of High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment (2001). See below for keynote abstract. The conference will feature 50 postgraduates from Australia and New Zealand delivering 20 minute papers on themes including display, spectacle and spectatorship. Entry is free (voluntary gold coin donation).

For all enquires email Ryan Johnston (e-mail address given below), or visit the web address listed below for updates and the conference program.

The Architecture Building is located off Swanston Street via Gate 3 (between Faraday and Elgin Streets), reference F18 on the University map: http://www.pb.unimelb.edu.au/CampusMaps/Parkville.pdf

Keynote Address: Assoc. Prof. Jim Collins: "We're All Curators Now"
How can an interdisciplinary department envision some kind of commonality of purpose, or at least identify paradigms that will be especially productive in terms of providing the basis for a shared conversation? "Cultural studies" as it has been practiced, is not the answer because it has reinforced traditional distinctions between high art and popular culture by focusing only almost exclusively on the latter. Yet cultural studies should have something to say about Culture when it becomes popular entertainment in the form of blockbuster museum shows, good design make-over television programs, opera singers as pop stars, etc. When any elite taste can be turned into popular culture, given the changes that have occurred within the past decade in information technologies and the targeting of quality audiences, we clearly need to pose some new questions about how culture is accessed and evaluated in the twenty-first century. Who gets to be a curator? What is an archive? And who functions as an authority when connoisseurship (or how to get it) has become a thriving form of popular culture?