CFP - ICA panel

Panel Session Proposal - ICA 2008

Commodity Activism

Recent years have witnessed a growing concern among scholars of communication and media over the limits of critical scholarship and social action, specifically the implications of neoliberalism in the “post-feminist,” “post-civil rights,” and “post-capitalist” era(s) as it bowdlerizes and represses forms of social action. As feminist media critics and scholars of race and ethnicity ponder the ongoing incorporation of radical icons into the logics of merchandising, as tactics and strategies of social critique become transformed into commodity forms surviving as little more than diverting spectacles, and as corporations and corporate celebrities take their place as new models for social action and empowerment leading charitable campaigns and global philanthropies, this panel serves to examine the ways in which social activism may itself be transforming into a branded commodity in the neoliberal era.

Providing a range of examples culled from news texts, radio and television media, Hollywood and independent films, the speakers on this panel consider modes and practices of social activism as marketable commodities that are produced through labor, for purposes of trade within markets, and which generate profit, competitive accumulation, and fetishization as commodities tend to do. Offering a variety of cases of “commodity activism,” this panel highlights the implications of such commoditization for critical scholarship and social action at this historical moment.

Contact Roopali Mukherjee [roopalimukherjee@earthlink.net]