Holy Crap! is an international conference organized by the Finnish Youth Research Society and Network, focusing on the interrelations between popular culture, youth and the sacred. The conference, to be held August 28-29, 2014, in Helsinki, Finland, aims at interrogating understandings of popular and youth cultures in relation to the contested phenomena of (post)secularization, re-enchantment and the emergence of alternative spiritualities. Seeking to analyze the social and cultural changes accompanying these phenomena, the conference will facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue between youth studies, cultural studies, religious studies and the broader social sciences.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in ”re-scripting the sacred” through popular culture. Although ”youth” as an age-based category has lost its privileged status within such studies of popular culture, young people remain vital (sub)cultural agents. There has also been renewed interest in the ubiquitous contestations and ambiguities around the notion of the ”popular” in light of the increasing commodification and standardization of culture, the opposition this engenders, and the cultural drift into virtual worlds.
Holy Crap! locates itself at the intersection of these three contested concepts, seeking to re-examine and re-evaluate the dynamics within and between cultural phenomena prefixed with ”popular”, ”sacred” and ”youth”.
Information about Organisers
The conference is a collaborative initiative of the Finnish Youth Research Society & Network, Departments of Comparative Religion at the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku (website only in Finnish) and Åbo Akademi University, in cooperation with the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, the International Institute for Popular Culture (Turku), the Finnish Society for Cultural Studies and the Finnish Jazz & Pop Archive (Helsinki), and YUNET, the Finnish university network of youth studies (website only in Finnish).