For Immediate Release
Contact: Deanna K.G. Ferrante, (609) 258-1651

Princeton University hosts meeting on cultural conflict in the United States

September 26, 2002

Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies is hosting a two day event on October 11 and 12 to explore the past and present of cultural conflict in the United States. The event is intended to highlight a three-year project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. It opens with a public forum at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, October 11 titled, “Culture, Contention, and Conflict: An Historical Perspective.” The forum will be held in Bowl 016 Robertson Hall on the Princeton University campus.

The public forum is a panel discussion meant to provide an historical context to contemporary battles over artistic expression and cultural and moral values. The panelists include: Stanley N. Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies; Gerald Graff, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Beyond the Culture War: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education; Michael Kammen, professor of history at Cornell University and author of Contested Values: Democracy and Diversity in American Culture; and Nell Irvin Painter, professor of history at Princeton University and author of Southern History Across the Color Line and the forthcoming Creating Black Americans (Oxford Press).

The second day’s events include closed working group sessions focusing on three main areas of cultural conflict: (1) public debates over arts, culture, and education in American schools and communities; (2) trends in public opinion about such cultural issues as abortion, homosexuality, and the arts; and (3) media depictions of cultural conflict. Some of the specific topics the working groups will discuss include: welfare policy; American values; religious conservatism and racial politics; conflicts over public school curricula; cultural conflict in American cities; public attitudes toward the National Endowment for the Arts; and newspapers' influence on the abortion debate.

The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and was created to improve the clarity, accuracy and sophistication of discourse about the nation's artistic and cultural life.

The public forum on Friday afternoon is free and open to the public. The events on Saturday are reserved for invited participants only. Media inquiries should be directed to Deanna K.G. Ferrante at (609) 258-1651.