Distinctive networks: Taste in the archives
Call for presentations

Organized by Networks, tastes and material culture: Archives in the age of mechanical reproduction (@netmat_nw) research network

21 May 2019, h 13-17
Royal Northern College of Music

This student run research network considers the use of archives and collections as sources for the exploration of past intellectual, aesthetic and professional networks. A series of half-day workshops will discuss the production and circulation of knowledge within and outside traditional cultural circuits, and the development of aesthetic trends particularly in the modern age (19th and 20th centuries). They aim to bring together in open and productive dialogue PhD students and early career researchers sharing material-based methodologies, as well as scholars and professionals in cultural heritage institutions.

The third half-day workshop, to be held at the Royal Northern College of Music on 21 May 2019, will focus on questions of taste, considering the ways in which archives and collections reflect and refract the aesthetic preferences of their networks of creators and asking what archives have to say about Bourdieu’s formulation that aesthetic preferences both mark and determine social distinction.

@Netmat_nw welcomes proposals for lightning-presentations (up to 10 minutes), on a single item or group of objects, and that consider questions of taste in the archive. These archival objects and assemblages might include printed or handwritten texts, artworks or music, three- dimensional objects both everyday and extraordinary. They might reveal the shaping of aesthetic preferences or trends through personal or institutional networks, or disrupt the powerful discourse of lowbrow/middlebrow/highbrow through their material presence.

Submission guidelines
Brief proposals for presentations should be submitted to netmat.nw@gmail.com by 26 April 2019.

Please note: travel expenses (within the UK) for presenters and NWCDTP funded students will be refunded; PhD students within the North West will be refunded if the budget allows.
The workshop is supported by the AHRC through the NWCDTP student run research networks
fund.

For further information: netmat.nw@gmail.com | http://netmatnw.wordpress.com | @netmat_nw

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