Fourth Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference

The Fourth Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE) shifts attention from the materiality of cultural production to the media industries’ generation and dissemination of both symbolic capital and cultural power. Prestige plays an important role in a sphere where marketing decisions routinely influence media content and its reception, where festivals and awards are ever more important, and where the distinction between texts proper and promotional paratexts is becoming increasingly blurred. The production and dispersal of symbolic capital is also central to East-Central European media industries’ struggle for visibility on international markets. Accordingly, and inspired by both Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural production and James F. Englishʼs The Economy of Prestige, this conference considers how markers of cultural value are mobilized in relation to particular institutions, initiatives, people, traditions, works, and awards in the region. The conference also considers how this phenomenon has operated under different political regimes and across various national and regional formations, and how it shapes East-Central European media’s location in today’s transnational media landscape.