CAMEo Conference - Re-Futuring Creative Economies, Leicester, UK

CAMEo is an interdisciplinary research institute exploring the changing dynamics of production and consumption in the cultural and creative industries, creative economy, media and arts – with a particular emphasis on participation, sustainability and social justice. We now invite submissions for our forthcoming conference Re-Futuring Creative Economies.

As the creative economy has become instituted as a field of policy and industrial activity, so it has become invested with orthodox and optimistic assumptions about the social futures it anticipates – pacific visions of ‘progress’ and ‘advancement’ that tend to take for granted renewed and stable economic growth, an increase in social participation and inclusion, and the emergence of ‘clean’ technologies to drive benign and enabling social experiences and innovations. These optimistic projections overlook a range of problems occasioned by current and future crises. Such projections are also de-futuring - in that they serve to close down the range of different, alternative, sustainable and socially-just creative economies that might otherwise be conceived and lived. What opportunity now is there for imagining and undertaking other, more progressive, creative economy futures?

We invite contributions for papers and panels that explore progressive possible futures for the cultural, media and creative economies. Contributions are invited on any the following (or related) themes:

• theorizing critical creative economies;
• challenging inequalities and injustices in cultural and creative work;
• improving inclusion, reciprocity and sharing in creative economies;
• building humane, alternative and heterodox creative economies;
• constructively challenging mainstream creative economy policy and practice;
• making creative economies ecologically sustainable;
• theorizing ‘circular’, ‘post-growth’ or ‘degrown’ creative economies;
• imagining utopian and/or dystopian creative futures;

Please use the application form and submit by Friday 7 June 2019.