About the Conference
International Conference on Material Culture (ICMC) was conceived in January 2021 as the first of its kind held locally and internationally that focuses on Asian and Southeast Asian material culture organised by the School of Arts, Sunway University.
Material culture refers to man-made and natural or altered objects that humans utilise in their daily living, which are understood in relation to specific cultural and historic contexts, communities and belief systems. The relationships between people and their things—the making, history, preservation, and interpretation of objects—are studied and analysed scholarly, drawing references from the social sciences and humanities.
The main objective of ICMC is to serve as a platform for researchers and scholars from the academia, along with creators and artists from the industry, to share their research ideas and creations revolving around Asian and Southeast Asian material culture, as well as to form alliances with one another in working towards developing and exploring new knowledges and creative approaches that will contribute towards the various disciplines of study and derive collaborative solutions that will benefit mankind and humanity.
Disciplines
Social sciences and humanities: art history, archaeology, anthropology, decorative arts, design, cultural studies, consumer studies, literature, history, historic preservation, folklore, archival science, museum studies.
ICMC 2021
This conference aims to provide a better understanding of past and present societies through objects that are no longer used or whose "life" is endangered by new modern lifestyles. We also aim to reconstruct the vision and perception of time through the use of objects, that is: routines; the idea of rapid or progressive obsolescence; phenomena such as "ageing" or travelling things; the different life cycles from the making to the "death" of objects (manufacturing, use/reuse, meaning in society, destruction etc.); the crystallisation and therefore immortalisation of some objects in the memory of some individuals through emotions and feelings. Due to uncertainties determined by the COVID-19 pandemic, ICMC 2021 will be organised as an online conference. The language of the conference is English.
