This conference approaches popular culture as a vibrant site of memory work (Kuhn 2000) – the practice of actively engaging with the past to understand, reinterpret, and challenge dominant narratives about it, with the aim of interrogating and transforming ways of feeling, being, and acting in the present. In the context of popular culture, memory work ranges from diverse readings, commentary, and creative re-appropriation and re-use of popular-cultural texts, to pursuing cultural production, distribution, and canonization models informed by insights into the mechanisms and mechanics of collective remembering and forgetting. For example, memory work may result in shifts in people’s mnemonic priorities, such as a reorientation from events to slow transformations, from victims and perpetrators to implicated subjects, and from monuments to ephemera and communities. It may also facilitate the articulation of unity in contexts that are habitually described as diverse, hybrid or transnational (cf. Bhaba 2000; Ebanda de B’béri 2009; Mwambari 2021).
The 4th annual Corvinus Communication Conferences (CoCoCo)
The 4th annual Corvinus Communication Conference (CoCoCo) explores the ways in which individuals, the public, and institutions are challenging contemporary power constructs and environments through communication practices.