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Dennis Soron
Dennis Soron is a faculty member in the Sociology department at Brock University, where he is also affiliated with the Labour Studies program and the graduate program in Social Justice and Equity Studies. His teaching and research interests include social theory, popular culture, the political economy of consumption, social movements, and radical ecology. He has published various book chapters, articles, and interviews on consumerism, work, the environment, and the problem of ‘depoliticization’. In 2006, his book co-edited with Gordon Laxer, Not For Sale: Decommodifying Public Life, was published by Broadview Press. His talk is entitled: The Politics of the Popular: Reframing the Debate Media, advertising and entertainment industries have increasingly grown in economic and cultural influence throughout much of the world. At present, they rank among the fastest-growing and most dominant sectors of the global economy, and are a looming presence in our everyday lives, providing the basic repertoire of images, narratives, and fantasies through which collective values are articulated and expressed. This talk wades anew into longstanding debates about the relationship between popular culture, and progressive social change, attempting to steer a course between moralistic pessimism and naïve optimism. It does this, in part, by arguing that the transformative potential of cultural expression is related not simply to its symbolic content, or to the formal features of the technologies that disseminate it, but to the social contexts in which it is created, experienced, and integrated into “popular” life.
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