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**Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the
Arts**

**Guest editors:** Simone Varriale (University of Warwick, UK), Noa
Lavie (The Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel)

 

Globalization's cultural effects have gained significant attention in
the sociology of culture. Especially from the early 2000s, a growing
literature on transnationally-connected cultural sectors has started
exploring the asymmetries of economic and symbolic power between
'centers' and 'peripheries' of cultural production, the role of
gatekeepers and organizations in mediating globalization processes, and
the limits of cultural imperialism as an exhaustive framework for
interpreting cultural globalization. Similarly, consumption studies have
started focusing on preferences for globally spread cultural products,
suggesting that theories of cultural hybridity need to pay more
attention to how class and other inequalities influence practices of
appropriation.

Despite these contributions, research on 'global' tastes and new,
transnational forms of cultural capital remains limited to some cases of
European high culture -- like French literature -- and to American and
British popular culture. Consumption research has focused on the growing
significance of Anglo-American pop music and television on a
transnational scale, but it has paid little attention to other forms of
global taste -- e.g. Japanese anime and manga, South Korean cinema,
Brazilian bossa nova, reggae music -- and their role in different
national and local contexts. Similarly, research on cultural production
has considered mostly the American and European centers of
well-established cultural sectors, like literature, television and
popular music. It is evident, however, that other contexts,
transnational connections and networks remain to be explored, and that
the impact of globalization on other fields, sub-fields and genres --
e.g. gaming, comics, hip hop, reality TV -- is underresearched.

Since cultural sociology has dealt mostly with the consequences of
Americanization, it remains difficult to construct a clear and precise
definition of what 'global taste' is and what it contains, and to
understand which actors and networks sustain these forms of distinction
and, potentially, cultural capital. We provisionally define global taste
as a taste for non-national cultural products and genres, one made
possible by transnational networks of producers, mediators and
consumers, as well as by cross-national connections between cultural
fields, policy makers and/or political institutions. Likewise, we wish
to adopt a broad, inclusive definition of global culture, one that moves
cultural sociology beyond its focus on the US, the UK and West/North
Europe, and which helps develop the concept of global taste beyond its
Anglo- and Euro-centric premises.

This Call for Papers thus encourages original, empirically-based
contributions that explore the production and global spread of African,
Asian, Australasian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Latin American
cultural forms, and their consumption, mediation and evaluation in a
variety of national, regional and local contexts. Our definition of
global taste also includes the cultural practices of migrant populations
and their descendants, and we also welcome research about the
transnational circulation of culture produced in peripheral and
semi-peripheral European contexts -- i.e. East and South European
countries -- as these remain underresearched in cultural sociology.

**Lines of inquiry**

We seek contributions focusing on the ways in which non-Anglo-American
culture is [produced, circulated, consumed and evaluated]{.underline}
around the globe. Papers engaging with issues of cultural production,
consumption, mediation and diffusion are hence welcome, and papers
updating or revising established theories of cultural research -- e.g.
art worlds, field theory, neo-institutionalism, production of culture --
are particularly encouraged. We are also interested in work that draws
innovative connections between these established approaches and new
areas of social theorizing, such as post-colonialism, decolonial theory,
transnationalism and cosmopolitanism.

We welcome papers focusing on all [actors, organizations and/or
networks]{.underline} involved with the aforementioned processes, and
analyzing the [meanings, aesthetic values and boundaries]{.underline} of
globally-oriented tastes, including their relationship with
cosmopolitan, nationalist and/or localist discourses, and with different
social groups -- in terms of class, gender and age, as well as
nationality, ethnicity and race.

**Instructions for authors**

The deadline for proposals is 15 September 2017. We ask for a 1500-word
abstract including the following: research questions, theoretical
framing, and description of the paper's methodology -- including a
specification of whether the data is already collected.

Please email your abstracts to Simone Varriale
(<s.varriale@warwick.ac.uk>) and Noa Lavie (<lavie@mta.ac.il>). Please
also include your institutional affiliation and a brief biography (max
100 words). Complete manuscripts, if ready, can also be submitted at
this stage.

Authors will be notified by mid-October. Proposals will be selected by
the Special Issue's editors -- Dr Simone Varriale and Dr Noa Lavie --
and by the editors of *Poetics*.

The deadline for submission of complete manuscripts is 15 April 2018.
Papers will be subject to an internal and external round of
peer-reviewing. The Special Issue is expected to be published in 2019.


<strong>
 Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts
</strong>
<strong>
 Guest editors:
</strong>
Simone Varriale (University of Warwick, UK), Noa Lavie (The Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel)    Globalization’s cultural effects have gained significant attention in the sociology of culture.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

CfP: Poetics: Special Issue on “Global Tastes: The Transnational Spread of non-Anglo-American Culture”. Deadline: Sept 15, 2017.