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The quiet revolution of poetry slam: the sustainability of cultural capital in the light of changing artistic conventions

This paper considers the educational and theoretical implications of an analysis into the artistic movement of poetry slam. Slam is a successful and growing global phenomenon, which both directly and indirectly sets itself against the dominant literary world. As such, it could be viewed as presenting a challenge to dominant literary conventions and thus to the cultural capital of those who rely upon such conventions. Using data drawn from an ongoing ethnographic study, employing semi-structured interviews with 44 poets, promoters and educators active in the slam community, and participant observation of 21 slams in four cities, this paper explores what poetry slam can tell us about the ways in which members of dominant art worlds and new artistic movements interact and the implications which this has for the sustainability of cultural capital in the light of newly emerging artistic conventions and discourses.