Work | Play: Making Cultures, Making Persons


subtheme 7

Individuals in contemporary societies are not only getting more commonly engaged in activities that cross geographical and political boundaries. Our everyday experiences also involve more practices that challenge the ontological boundaries of modern dichotomies: public/private spheres, production/consumption, and particularly work/leisure, for example. Accordingly, categories such as art, fashion, media, sport, etc. cannot be taken for granted as cultural products or merely forms of cultural representation, but are an articulation of nuanced relationships between social structure, discursive practices, human and non-human agencies. Basically these are as much fields of socio-cultural struggle as processes through which personhood are configured and reconfigured in diverse localities.

This sub-theme invites panels and papers that stimulate dialogues about theoretical challenges and ethnographic contributions of sociological and anthropological approaches to arts, commodities, popular culture and new media. Panel and paper topics may include, but are not limited to: indigenous-global art, architecture and design; art in the age of biological and digital reproduction; post-industrial work and lives; lifestyle migrants and transnational consumption; mobile money, communal and digital currencies; philanthrocapitalism, social entrepreneurs and enterprises; open access and knowledge economy; polymedia; cognitive capitalism and digital labour; colonialism, nationalism and sport; sport and media, business, politics, and masculinity; games, indigenous cosmology and morality.