Panel and individual paper proposals are now being accepted for the inaugural Oceanic Popular Culture Association Conference. While all topics and proposals will be considered, those treating the conference theme of "Work and Play" are particularly welcome.

Theorists as diverse as Michael Oakeshott and Erich Fromm have emphasized the transformative power of play and warned of the dangerous consequences of misconstruing the relationship between leisure and labor activities. With accelerations in communications technology such as email, cell-phones, and text-messaging, our workday has become unbounded, suffusing leisure time along with all other aspects of life. While many contemporary commercials extol the virtue of devices that allow us to work at home or on vacation, others exploit the fantasy of literally throwing one’s pager into the sea. Have these technologies granted us more leisure or accomplished an even more thorough subordination of play to work? Such concerns are particularly appropriate for an academic conference hosted in Hawai‘i, where our primary industry is for better or worse the labor of leisure.

The conference theme of "Work and Play" invites discussions of labor and leisure as both discreet and entangled categories.

Prospective presenters may treat images of work and/or play in literature, film, television, music, and other media. The conference theme also accommodates interpretations of the various forms of "cultural work" performed by the text(s) at hand. In addition to offering textual analyses, presenters are welcome to discuss cultural practices and traditions that broadly intersect with the conference theme.