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Changing Cultures: Cultures of Change |
10-12 December 2009
University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Conference Report from the Chair
Across disciplines, intensive or topological approaches to the study of culture treat change as normal and immanent rather than exceptional and externally determined. Culture is understood in terms of possibility and topological approaches provide a set of tools to think about engaging different kinds of change - learning, transmission, innovation, adaptation, self-organisation and evolution. This conference asks: what is the potential of topological and other intensive approaches for thinking about change? It explores the value of thinking about culture as a privileged site or mechanism for change, but it also asks how and why the question of change is being posed in relation to culture today. This question is especially important at a time when calculation and complex technical systems have become ubiquitous elements in human life, in specialised sites of scientific enquiry and in everyday life. In contemporary society, numbers do not just describe but they construct and - in topological thinking - take on virtual properties, building abstract spaces of calculation and opening up the possibility of new perspectives on the questions of cultural predictability and innovation.
What are the tools, techniques and artifacts of thinking topologically about cultural change? What spaces do they make? How can the current development of material culture of topological thinking be taken into account, reflexively, as a research topic? What are the cultural implications of the growth of technical systems, quantitative calculation and ideas and procedures concerned with number, counting, and logic, the increase in lists and registers, and the rise of logistics, of innovations in thinking about linkages and technologies of address, and the combination and organisation of these operations into systems in everyday life? What kinds of engagement are adequate to the task of thinking and acting in response?
Finally, the conference will also address issues of method, and in particular examine the current interest in the use of quantitative methods to investigate and understand qualitative change. Can anything - or everything - be measured in numbers? What role do modeling, simulation and experimentation have in the study of culture? How can we understand cultures of qualification? What are the implications of studying culture for the uses and meanings of numbers?
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Conference