Professor Liza Tsaliki from the Department of Communication and Media Studies National and Kapodistrian University of Athens has pulled together a major international conference, that features scholars and journalists from across the world. Emergent Femininities and Masculinities in the 21st Century Media and Popular Culture is on for three days September 15 to 17 in Athens.
Prof. Tsakiki has a significant reputation is a scholar of citizenship and participation, with a focus on pornography, celebrity, and celebrity activism. The cultural studies expert also is interested in issues of gender and technology, sexuality, constructions of femininity, television narratives, and debates about children’s and young people’s everyday practices and consumption.
The Melbourne based Professor Sean Redmond, from Screen and Design at Deakin University is one of the four keynote speakers. Prof. Redmond has written extensively on stardom and celebrity; genre studies, and science fiction cinema in particular, film sound and Asian Cinema.
The other keynote speakers include, Professor Sarah Banet Weiser from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Professor Rosalind Gill, Social and Cultural Analysis, University of London and Professor Danielle R. Egan from Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality Studies and Department Chair, Connecticut College.
The Conference examines the social impact in the aftermath of #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite movements, the proliferation of celebrity culture, and the call for greater diversity.
Along with a turn to ‘character’ and ‘resilience’ building, the notion that ‘representation matters’ back has resurfaced.
Diversity, character, and resilience have become catchphrases across cultures and borders. They gave become indicators of progress, and an aspiration for young.
Speakers at the conference will investigate “reductive notions of the politics of representation”, in other words the idea that the quantity of representation is a sign of progress. The conference will examine the ways femininity and masculinity are now being constructed, dismantled, or reinvented in the 21st century, in everyday life, in the media and pop culture.
Panel discussions will tackle issues such as the rise of hate journalism: misogyny and homophobia in Greek far right media by Eugenia Siapera and Lambrini Papadopoulou; How to be a Black man in Greece: the construction of (celebrity) Black masculinity in contemporary Athens by Prof. Tsaliki, and Despina Chronaki. Neos Kosmos‘ journalist Fotis, Kapetopoulos will also be part of a panel discussing how he and author Christos Tsiolkas talk about being men born in, and of, Greek migration in Australia.
