Mediations on diversity - the production and uses of culture in society
Médiations de la diversité
Productions et usages de la culture en société
Published on Monday, September 05, 2016
Abstract
Nos sociétés contemporaines, au Maroc, en France comme ailleurs dans le monde, sont confrontées à des défis majeurs en termes de définition de l’unité nationale et de gestion des diversités tous azimuts. Ce constat vaut autant pour les pays du Nord que pour ceux du Sud, si tant est que ce découpage demeure encore valide quand on pense à la migration transculturelle des contenus médiatiques et aux effets imprévisibles sur les usagers qu’elle induit.
Announcement
Argument
Our contemporary societies, in Morocco, France and around the world are facing major challenges in terms of defining national unity and managing diversity in all directions. This applies to both the Northern and Southern countries if this division remains valid when we consider the trans-cultural migration of media content and its unpredictable effects on users. From a national perspective, the challenge remains as true for the countries marked by a very strong intrinsic cultural plurality as for those whose plurality is further accentuated by migration. As a matter of fact, many countries may be exemplified in one direction or another.
On this basis, it is imperative to note that the current forms of production and transmission of information, speeches and knowledge about society are so diverse and varied that they require critical support from researchers in human and social sciences to describe the cultural experience of users and question the mediation all devices provided for these uses for the recognition of cultural diversity and the fair distribution of culture. For as Bhabha stresses in Nation and Narration (1990), whenever the question of cultural difference emerges as a challenge to the diversity of culture the borders of modernity are drawn.
Language, text, media and arts have always been means of mediation that contribute to the definition of the cultural practices related to the social subject and to the construction of public space as well. These practices often refer to the way of being situated in space (question of belonging) and time (the dimension of heritage), of describing social reality and of identifying users as full actors of culture. This mediation system gives the basis, on the one hand, to the links and the boundaries between world objects, giving them a cultural, artistic, literary and linguistic aspect and on the other hand, to those users that determine the direction and ownership on a purely performative plan.
This is the unifying force of the social field and involvement of actors to which these contents are intended. This means that mediation is about bringing together at least two poles that determine the scope of content (prototypes, stereotypes, beliefs, ideologies, identities, gender, etc.) and the content that these actors face or are in contact with, which they manage to define or redefine, to transform and in general to project in the space of representation. Yet, two questions arise here: the first is about the link between high culture and the recipients of the remote social spaces, especially in a centered cultural space (national, ethnic and linguistic centrality, etc.) or insufficiently developing a cultural policy. The second question is about the relevance of mediation policies in favor of a plural cultural space where differences could be linked to each other in national spaces with a cultural and linguistic plurality, either for reasons related to History, or for re-configurations relating to immigration and the reception of foreign communities.
In this regard, the way of disseminating knowledge about society challenges both the existing mediation process and the question of appropriate practices expected of media and each institution involved in the cultural fact. This is what drives to questioning the processes of formation and circulation of ideas and their impact on the construction of meaning, its reception and its representation by the public. In this regard, the discursive strategies remain devices involved in scoping the appraisal of the receiver, his/her reaction and interaction with his/her environment. Several questions arise:
- What discursive, linguistic and "multimedia" strategies are deployed in the formation of a centered, unified or plural public space?
- To what extent do the linguistic, literary and artistic practices found in the social field refer to real or imaginary constructions, with a shape and meaning? To what extent do they help in the inter-individual and collective understanding? To what extent do they show how usage configures and develops new forms, new supports, new worlds shaped or to be shaped?
- What can art, in particular literature and circulating institutions do about the gestures to make literary works read and works of art seen and appreciated, outside the closed circles of the uses of intellectual elites?
- What power do texts, speeches and artistic media have on the living and bodies of public space?
- Does the supremacy of the media, as an essential means of mediation, participate in the construction of society? Would it not be behind the configuration or reconfiguration necessary for spaces, discourses, cultures and societies?
- Does the teaching of mediation in societies characterized by mixture and linguistic and cultural diversity actually manage to explain the linguistic, cultural, political, socio-pedagogical and didactic issues to which individuals and groups are confronted today?
To provide some answers to these questions, we are inviting researchers inlinguistics, discourse analysis, literature, history, art, anthropology, social psychology, cultural and civilizational studies and information sciences and communication to present their research works where they question the uses or new uses made of language, speeches, texts and arts as mediation means in contexts that are both plural and increasingly individualized in the era of globalization.
Key notes
- Alfonso de Toro (Université de Leipzig) (Confirmed)
- Louis-Jean Calvet (Université de Provence) (confirmed)
- Nabil Bayahya (Mazars) (confirmed)
- Daniel Castillo Durante (Université d’Ottawa) (to be confirmed)
Subjects
- Language (Main category)
- Mind and language > Representation > Cultural identities
- Society > Sociology > Sociology of culture
Places
- Faculté des Lettres de Rabat
Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco
Date(s)
- Sunday, October 30, 2016
Attached files
Keywords
- médiation, culture, représentation, identité
Contact(s)
- Hassan Moustir
courriel : moustirhassan [at] gmail [dot] com
Reference Urls
Information source
- Hassan Moustir
courriel : moustirhassan [at] gmail [dot] com
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Mediations on diversity - the production and uses of culture in society », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, September 05, 2016, https://doi.org/10.58079/vnv
