About the MEMPOP Final Conference & ACS Institute 2026

Over the past several decades, the expansion, relative global accessibility, and accelerated hybridization of the diverse cultural and creative industries – from Bollywood and Nollywood to K-Pop, to Balkan turbofolk, and Polish video games on the one hand, to various transcultural and antihegemonic (feminist, queer, minoritarian) expressions on the other – have contributed to shifts in people’s experience and understanding of identities, communities, history, and power relations. As has been demonstrated convincingly by scholars in cultural studies and related disciplines (cf. for example Hall 1973; Ang 1985; McRobbie 1994; Muňoz 1999; Huq 2006; Chen 2010; Grossberg 2010) popular culture informs the ways we perceive and engage with the world by offering narrative and aesthetic templates that shape horizons of possibilities and expectations. Ranging from film, TikTok videos, memes, fanzines, music playlists and concerts, to murals, graffiti, stickers, poetry and prose, and video games, diverse popular cultural forms facilitate cultural participation, including engagement with collective memory.  

The final conference of the MEMPOP project will take place during the ACS Institute – a series of workshops, roundtables, and a vibrant cultural program. In collaboration with MEMPOP, the ACS Institute 2026 offers a platform for developing new perspectives on the impact of contemporary popular culture as a generator of transmedia imaginaries that are entangled with different – and often competing – positionalities, inequalities, struggles, and perceptions of time, space, and place.   

The Institute seeks to unpack popular culture as a vibrant site of decolonial practices, many of which are inextricably linked to memory work – conscious, but non-essentializing engagement with collective and individual memory as an impactful dimension of individual and collective identification and agency. As a site of increasingly networked and decentralized meaning and feeling contestation, negotiation, and transformation, contemporary popular culture is significant to the unfinished project of epistemic decolonization. By epistemic decolonization, we refer to the articulation of the diversity of cultural practices, forms, processes, and regimes of production, circulation, and consumption that disrupt colonial imperatives, such as Western claims to the universality of knowledge. Additionally, epistemic decolonization refers to the examination of the complex entanglements of cultural production with the (neo)colonial economic, political, epistemological, and cultural paradigms that contribute to the proliferation of injustice, inequality, and violence. In the context of the current geopolitical struggles between the US and China, Europe and Russia, as well as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, advancing the project of epistemic decolonization is of vital importance to reclaiming hope and radically re-imagining futures.

We invite applications from postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and advanced scholars worldwide to share their ongoing projects with various disciplinary backgrounds: cultural studies, media and communication studies, cultural sociology, literary studies, film studies, visual cultural studies, cultural anthropology, political philosophy, and related disciplines are all welcome. Consult the Final Conference and ACSI 2026 tabs for instructions on how to submit an abstract for the conference or on how to register for the Institute.

The event is organized by the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.