ABSTRACT
The collection of essays offered in this issue of Continuum is an outcome of the conference ‘B for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value’, convened by Alexia Kannas, Claire Perkins, Julia Vassilieva and Constantine Verevis, and organized by Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Melbourne in April 2009. Taking place exactly 30 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s celebrated Distinction (1979) – a monograph that offered up a powerful critique of transcendental claims to culture – the conference not only paid (implicit) homage to Bourdieu’s legacy but also demonstrated how far the critique of taste has ventured in one particular cultural field: namely that of film and television studies.
