Call for Papers: Culture Wars – Statues, Flags, Streets and Squares by WPCC – EuroClio – Inspiring History and Citizenship Educators

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC) has announced a call for papers in which it welcomes submissions that cover the role of the media in all forms (from public service broadcasting to social media, feature films to advertising) exploring contested representations of symbols and their remediation.

Flags, emblems, monuments, street names, statues are some of the means by which nations and states promote themselves, both to their own citizens and to the world at large; the public face of our imagined communities. But as they seek to unify, such symbols have often been the occasion for contestation, disagreement, violence even. Empires, systems, regimes rise and fall. Societies change, and with such change comes a reassessment of societies’ symbolic life, as yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains, past triumphs a present embarrassment. The past is continually raked over, re-examined and reinterpreted, with each re-examination argued over.