Pursuing the Trivial

Pursuing the Trivial - Investigations into Popular Culture is a postgraduate conference with Invited Guest Speakers, scheduled for June 1 – 2, 2012 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the University of Vienna. The international and interdisciplinary conference is organised by Prof. Dr. Monika Seidl (Department of English, University of Vienna), Prof. Dr. Roman Horak (Department of Art and Cultural Sociology, University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Mag. Barbara Maly (Department of English, University of Vienna).

Pursuing the Trivial presents postgraduate students who submit papers that deal with aspects of the trivial, the popular, the common, the ordinary, the banal and the everyday. In our conference we would like to explore meanings, roots and routes of mundane practices, texts and artefacts through the ages and how they, for example, relate to gender, class or race identities; language and communication; genre, media and technology; politics and power; local and global impacts, material and economic contexts.

We are also pleased to announce that we will have Claire Monk (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK), John Storey (University of Sunderland, UK), Andrea Braidt (University of Fine Arts, Vienna), Caroline Evans (University of the Arts, London, UK), Christian Huck (University of Kiel, Germany) and George Spitaler (University of Vienna) performing as guest speakers at our conference, who will give papers themselves during the conference.