{"id":20370,"date":"2026-07-20T14:12:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/?post_type=veranstaltung&p=20370"},"modified":"2026-07-20T14:27:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:27:15","slug":"workshop-confessions-of-bad-taste","status":"publish","type":"veranstaltung","link":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/veranstaltung\/workshop-confessions-of-bad-taste\/","title":{"rendered":"Workshop: Confessions of Bad Taste"},"content":{"rendered":"

Performances of shamelessness and <\/em>mechanisms of shaming define our contemporary world. Yet not so long ago, confessions of supposedly shameful activities were accompanied by a sense of glee. Enjoying rom-coms, reality TV, or fast food was framed as a “guilty pleasure” \u2013 and reflexively dismissed as trivial and self-explanatory. However, closer inspection reveals guilty pleasures to be a complex and contradictory discursive phenomenon. The workshop \u201cConfessions of Bad Taste\u201d sets out to investigate guilty pleasures as a specific speech act. What is at stake in the public performance of guilty pleasures? Where, exactly, does the desire to confess one\u2019s own guilty pleasures come from? And why do we take such delight in doing this?<\/p>\n

We can distinguish several recurring assumptions regarding the act of confessing guilty pleasures: It is viewed as an innocent practice and topic of conversation; as the result of disciplinary regimes that suppress pleasure and joy; as a subversive act that destabilizes systems of cultural value; or as an affirmative act that reinforces distinctions by devaluing popular taste. In such approaches, guilty pleasures are tied to the globalization of consumer culture and thus understood as products of the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup>century. But similar discursive phenomena date back at least to the Enlightenment. They are linked to the development of overseas trade, colonialism, and the onset of bourgeois society, leading to the first so-called consumer revolution. For millennia, what was seen as superfluous consumption inconsistent with a person\u2019s status was the subject of moral condemnation, as discourses on luxury and greed widely indicate. This changed in the 18th<\/sup> century, giving way to more ambivalent stances toward consumption, which is why the workshop proposes to probe the longer and unwritten history of guilty pleasures. Are there other historical periods or geographical areas that might shed a different light on the phenomena?<\/p>\n

Through interdisciplinary exchange, the workshop aims to explore the historically and culturally shifting relationships between consumption, status, value judgments, and affect that are articulated through performances of guilty pleasures. We welcome proposals from a diverse range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. Submissions from media studies, social anthropology, global history, religious studies, linguistics, psychology, gender studies, ethnography, philosophy, economics, political science, and the digital humanities are encouraged.<\/p>\n

Further information on potential contributions to the workshop can be found in the complete call<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The workshop is organized as part of the research project “Towards a Genealogy of Guilty Pleasures: Performing Reflexive Consumption”<\/a> based at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen<\/em> (KWI) and the Ruhr University Bochum<\/em> (RUB). It is funded by the VolkswagenStiftung<\/em> under the funding initiative “Open Up \u2013 New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies”. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered.<\/p>\n

Format: max. 20-minute presentation + 25-minute discussion<\/p>\n

Language: English<\/p>\n

Submission guidelines: Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biography to paul.buckermann@kwi-nrw.de<\/a> by October 15, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","event_category":[],"class_list":["post-20370","veranstaltung","type-veranstaltung","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltung\/20370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltung"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/veranstaltung"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"event_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event_category?post=20370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}