The international conference “Managing Mass Culture” is organized by members of the American Studies Division at the Leibniz University of Hannover. Confirmed speakers are Amy Borden, Michael Chaney, Jared Gardner, Sabine Haenni, Scott Higgins, Frank Kelleter, Rob King, and Kathleen Loock.

The conference, which is hosted by members and associates of the research unit "Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice," investigates the ways in which mass-medial phenomena engage with modes and formats, concepts and ideologies of seriality, focusing on how these engagements manifest in film (in particular film serials and remakes), comics, and other popular products in the serial form. It explores the intersections between cultural and industrial structures of serialization, and the function that discourses of social engineering, psycho-technics, policing, and surveillance gain in the emergence and unfolding of a serialized mass culture of entertainment.

The conference starts from the observation that modernity’s mass culture is inextricably entwined in structures of capitalist production and distribution, and that this enmeshment is both expressed and reflected in the serial narratives of the period. The apparatuses of mass-cultural entertainment prepare people for the requirements of modernity in all of its complexity and they open gateways for individual and collective positionings within modernity. Modernity’s serial narratives chart modernity in its complexity and contingency. To this purpose, serial knowledge, which is always both complicated and vague, generates a sense of familiarity and orientation by means of signals, cross-references, allusions, and associations rather than taking recourse to clear-cut doctrine or systematic delineation. Thus serial practices can be understood as expressions and negotiations of a larger cultural and social framework of standardization, surveillance, and management.

For more information, please see http://www.engsem.uni-hannover.de/massculture2015.html

The conference is open to the public; to register please contact Ilka Brasch,
ilka.brasch@engsem.uni-hannover.de