Hosted by Lingnan University, a distinctive liberal arts institution in Hong Kong, and organized by its Department of Cultural Studies and Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme, the 8th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference will be held in Hong Kong 17 - 21 June 2010.

The International Crossroads Conferences were started in 1996 in Tampere, Finland to fill what was felt to be a gap in the international cultural studies community. Since then it had become one of the most important international conferences in cultural studies where scholars from all five continents get together to exchange their scholarly insights and to get in touch with different cultures. Organized by the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS), the Crossroads Conference has been held every 2 years in different parts of the world: Birmingham in UK, Illinois in US, Istanbul in Turkey and Kingston in Jamaica. This will be the first Crossroads Conference to be held in Asia Pacific.

The Crossroads Conference has the pleasure of inviting the following outstanding scholars as keynote and plenary speakers at this five-day conference this time:

Katherine Gibson (Australia)
Opening Keynote Speech: After "The End of Capitalism": What's Next?

Katherine Gibson is Professor of Human Geography at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. She is an economic geographer engaged in rethinking economic concepts in the light of feminist and poststructuralist theory. With Professor Julie Graham from the University of Massachusetts, she shares a collective authorial presence as J.K. Gibson-Graham and have written many works including The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy and A Postcapitalist Politics.

Tony Bennett (UK / Australia)
Closing Keynote Speech: After Culture

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He will be moving to the University of Western Sydney in 2010 as Professor of Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Recent publications include Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism and New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris).

Anne Balsamo (United States)
Plenary Speech: Designing Culture: The Architecture and Performance of Innovation

A scholar, researcher, new media designer, and entrepreneur, Anne Balsamo's work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. She is currently a Full Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications at University of Southern California. She directs the Interactive Media Co-Design Lab that houses research projects on tangible culture, immersive media, and stereoscopic cinema.

Josephine Ho (Taiwan)

Josephine Ho is Distinguished Professor of The Center for the Study of Sexualities, Department of English at National Central University, Taiwan (http://sex.ncu.edu.tw). She founded and continues to head the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National Central University widely-known for both its activism and intellectual stamina. She has been writing cultural criticism on a wide array of subjects, most notably gender/sexuality issues, since the early 1990s and has been working to promote the institutionalization of cultural studies in the academy.

Kara Keeling (United States)
Plenary Speech: Black Futures and the Queer Times of Our Life

Kara Keeling is Assistant Professor in the Division of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her current research involves issues of temporality, media, and black and queer cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory. Author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, she currently serves as an Elected Representative to the Modern Language Association's Division on Film and on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies and American Quarterly, where she is a managing editor.

Sandro Mezzadra (Italy)
Plenary Speech: Bringing Capital Back In: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?

Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of "History of Political Thought" at the Department of Politics, Institutions, History of the University of Bologna, where he teaches "Colonial and Postcolonial Studies" and "Frontiers of Citizenship". He has been "eminent research fellow" at the Centre for Cultural Research of the University of Western Sydney, Australia (2006-2008). In recent years his work has centered on the relations between globalization, migration and citizenship.

Pun Ngai (China)
Plenary Speech: The Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontract System and the Collective Action of Construction Workers in Postsocialist China

Pun Ngai is Deputy Director of the Peking University - HK Polytechnic University Social Service Center and Associate Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She was the first Asian winner of the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award in 2006 since its establishment in 1964. Her award-winning book is titled Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, for which she conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China's Guangdong province.

Vinod Raina (India)

A physicist by profession, Vinod Raina resigned from Delhi University to devote full time to grassroots work. He is one of the pioneers of the People's Science Movement in India that attempts to empower people to plan and implement their own developmental ideas and needs. He is founding member of Eklavya, an NGO which has been advocating alternative education for more than two decades; and has helped set up the All-India People's Science Network and the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti.

Andrew Ross (United States)
Plenary Speech: Urban Sustainability in the Age of Climate Justice

Andrew Ross is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times; Fast Boat to China: Lessons from Shanghai; Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor; No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town.

Catherine Walsh (United States / Ecuador)
Plenary Speech: Pedagogies of the Decolonial: Political-Epistemic Insurgency, Critical Interculturality, and Cultural Studies in the Andes

Catherine Walsh is senior professor and director of the Latin American Cultural Studies Doctoral Program at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador where she also directs the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino, a project dedicated to the recuperation of knowledge in Afro-Ecuadorian communities, and the Intercultural Workshop. Her current research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, decolonial thoughts and pedagogies, interculturality, and the political-epistemic force of present day Afro Andean and Indigenous movements.

The Crossroads Conference is open to all topics relevant to Cultural Studies, while new and innovative topics are most welcome. Here are some suggested topics for paper and panel proposals:

• Utopia / Dystopia
• Postsecularism
• Intellectual Property/Piracy
• Climate Change/The Environment
• Spatial Practices
• State and Sovereignty
• Labour and Production Cultures
• Economics, Crisis and Culture
• Fundamentalism
• Return to the Communities
• Confinement & the Suspension of Law
• Creativity
• Food
• Cultural Practice and Participation
• Cultural Citizenship
• Cultural Politics
• Money/Corporate Cultures
• Discourse of Rights
• Sexuality
• Gender and Institutions

Call for proposals is already in progress. For details, please visit our conference website at http://www.crossroads2010.org

Conference Director: Stephen Ching-kiu Chan

Associate Conference Director: John Nguyet Erni

Academic Director: Meaghan Morris