arch Seminal book on Punk, Ageing and Time published

BCMCR researcher Dr Matt Grimes and fellow punk scholar Dr Laura Way (University of Roehampton ), have a new co-authored editied collection titled Punk, Ageing and Time published today as part of the Subcultures Network  Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music (PSHSPM) series (Palgrave Macmillan

To date there has been no plotting of punk scholarship which speaks to ‘time’, yet there are some clear bodies of work pertaining to particular issues relevant to it, including ageing and/or the life course and punk, memory and/or nostalgia and punk, ‘punk history’, and archiving and punk. Punk, Ageing and Time is therefore a timely (pun intended) book.

What this edited collection does for the first time is bring together contemporary investigations and discussions specifically around punk and ageing and/or time, covering areas such as: punk and ageing; the relationship between temporality and particular concepts relevant to punk (such as authenticity, DIY, identity, resistance, spatiality, style); and punk memory, remembering and/or forgetting. Multidisciplinary in nature and international in reach, this book considers areas which have received very little to no academic attention previously.

There will be an online book launch Wednesday 17th April 15.30 UK time , featuring many of the international contributors to this seminal edited collection.

Email matt.grimes@bcu.ac.uk for a link to the online launch

arch BFI Reuben Library Book Launch – Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism.

Working Women on Screen cover

On Friday 8^th March, to celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, BCMCR’s Dr Ellie Tomsett and Dr Poppy Wilde, and their co-editor Dr Nathalie Weidhase (University of Surrey) launched their edited collection Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan) at the British Film Institute’s Reuben Library.

This new edited collection brings together international scholars to consider the ways women’s working lives are depicted across screen media. Chapters consider case study representations found within film, television, video games and on social media platforms, to analyse how the contemporary feminist context (often referred to as fourth wave feminism) and the changes to how women engage in paid labour is reflected on screen. The volume includes consideration of popular British and American television comedy and drama (Veep [HBO, 2012-2019], Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist [NBC 2020-2021], Getting On [BBC, 2009-2013 ], Shrill [Hulu, 2019-2021], Mythic Quest [Apple TV+ 2020 – present], Game of Thrones [HBO,2011-2019], Trust Me [BBC, 2017]) , American, German and Japanese cinema (Tully [2018], I’m Your Man [2021], 37 Seconds [2019]), reality television (Selling Sunset [Netflix, 2019-present]), influencer and streaming cultures across Instagram and Chinese platforms Inke and RED, sci-fi video game Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019) and recorded awards acceptance speeches by influential show runner Shonda Rhimes.

L-R Professor Adrienne Evans, Dr Louise Coopey, Dr Eleonora Sammartino, Dr Nathalie Weidhase, Dr Poppy Wilde, Dr Ellie Tomsett and Dr Hannah Hamad

The public talk celebrating the book’s launch was audio recorded and included some of the UK based contributing authors; Dr Eleonora Sammartino (University of Southampton), Professor Adrienne Evans (Coventry University), Dr Louise Coopey (University of Birmingham) and Dr Hannah Hamad (Cardiff University) who also chaired the event. You can listen back to the event via the BCMCR Vimeo channel here. 

arch ‘This Town’ and the TV Production Landscape in Birmingham

‘This Town’, Birmingham Town Hall 19 March 2024

Cast and producers Q&A panel

On 19 March 2024 I had the pleasure of attending the red-carpet screening of Steven Knight’s new drama, ‘This Town’ in Birmingham’s Town Hall.  It was a good watch, especially for those of us who spent some of our youth in 1980s Birmingham and Coventry. The contemporary, but 80’s nostalgic soundtrack was spot on. Knight describes the six-part series as his “love letter” to the area he grew up in. The drama starts on BBC 1 on Easter Sunday 31 March. 

The series has been heralded as the beginning of a new age of television production in the West Midlands. The production company Kudos Knight, who created ‘This Town’, has a commitment to shooting more dramas in the region, which is potentially reassuring news for the many skilled production staff and crew who are currently looking for work with the closure of BBC Doctors earlier this year. 

From the discussions last night from the BBC and the producers of ‘This Town’ there is an appetite for authentic, gritty dramas that reflect life outside of London. This was said as if it was a new idea, whilst actually the BBC and others have been creating gritty, authentic dramas in Birmingham since the 1950s. There are many examples to choose from, like the 1967 series ‘Rainbow City’, featuring Errol John, which told the experiences of the West Indian community in Birmingham, or the 1976 Play for Today, ‘Gangsters’, which explored issues of extortion, drug dealing and blackmail in Birmingham’s underworld. In fact, in 1971 when the BBC moved into its broadcast centre: Pebble Mill, the English Regions Drama Department was established with the remit to represent life outside London. Something it did to great effect, producing iconic dramas like ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ and ‘Nuts in May’, but also shorter thirty-minute dramas like the 1973 ‘A Touch of Eastern Promise’, the first UK drama with an entirely Asian cast, set in Balsall Heath.  

Sadly, the quantity of production in Birmingham reduced as the BBC disbanded its factual production base in the city in the early 2000s, with only the BBC Drama Village in Selly Oak continuing the legacy of what had been started by the early pioneers when the BBC was in Gosta Green from 1955, and then at Pebble Mill from 1971. BBC Doctors, was the mainstay of the Drama Village’s productions, creating hundreds of hours of continuing drama each year. It gave Birmingham a critical mass of skilled crew and production workers, who would move agilely between productions. The danger is that with the downturn in television production across the whole of the UK, and the closure of Doctors specifically, that some of those skilled crew won’t be able to wait for new productions from Kudos Knight and others to start staffing up in Birmingham. 

However, the future of television production in Birmingham is looking a lot more rosy than elsewhere in the UK. The much-awaited move of ‘Masterchef’ to Birmingham is happening later this year, and ‘Silent Witness’ will be moving here in due course. ‘Masterchef’ will bring a couple of hundred production jobs to the region when it is fully up and running.  

The West Midlands is also privileged to be selected as one of six BFI Skills Cluster areas, which comes with a commitment to fund training programmes to address skills shortages in the sector. We are currently seeing the delivery of the first of these, with the Create Central Skills Accelerator training programmes. These cater for both entry level and more senior roles. Birmingham City University in partnership with University of Wolverhampton are delivering the ‘Rock Up Ready’ training programme for graduate trainees, whilst Mission Accomplished have teamed with BOA Academy to deliver two programmes: ‘TV and Film Fusion’ and ‘Step Up to HoD’.  

The signs look positive that there will be screen industry jobs for these trainees, as well as more established production workers, to move into as production in the region begins to expand again. 

Dr Vanessa Jackson

arch Game Cultures cluster presents: Video Game Cultures 2024

BCMCR’s Game Cultures cluster is proud to be hosting the 2024 Video Game Cultures conference, 12-14 September 2024. 

Drawing on threads emerging from last year’s Video Game Cultures conference in Klagenfurt, the theme for this year’s conference is other in all its permutations: other, others, othered, othering, otherness, and beyond. We seek to centre marginal practices, marginal identities, peripheral national traditions, and consider researcher positionality in/as other. Let us reflect on other spaces and sites of gaming, discuss other approaches and methods to studying games, players, and gaming cultures. What can we learn from (or about) other researcher practices, other player practices, other design and industrial practices? How do video games create or recognise difference, what does alternative embodiment look or feel like, and what worlds are possible in games?

Video Game Cultures 2024 will therefore investigate various ways in which video game cultures, technologies, practices, communities, paratexts and genres develop within the framework of five thematic tracks. As digital games encompass an expanding range of highly complex and variant phenomena, this often leads to an overlap of issues across themes, so we are inviting participants of all backgrounds (academic, developer, producer, player, fan etc.) to submit proposals to this interdisciplinary event.

Find full CFP here: https://videogamecultures.org/2024-cfp/

300-word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Tuesday 30 April 2024. 

We hope to see you in September!

arch Media Materialities: Form, Format and Ephemeral Meaning

Published December 2023, Media Materialities: Form, Format and Ephemeral Meaning is the second title in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research’s New Directions in Media and Cultural Studies book series, published by Intellect and the University of Chicago Press. The book offers new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies, Media Materialities explores how  the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use, and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured, transformed, and redefined through changing social, cultural, and technological values.

The book considers the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use, and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media, culture, and society.

To celebrate the book’s publication, we are holding a book launch on the 10 April in the Parkside Building’s Shell space, where the editors, Iain A. Taylor and Oliver Carter will be part of a Q&A discussion, followed by short presentations from authors who contributed chapters to the collection. We also be holding an exhibition of materials that are featured in the book.

arch Doing Women’s Film and Television History VI conference

Locating Women in the Archive 

The DWFTH VI conference June 2023 at the University of Sussex was both stimulating and enjoyable. It was valuable to meet up in person and be able to talk to scholars whose work I had read, but never met. I took part in two roundtable events with colleagues from the IWBHN (International Women’s Broadcast History Network); one on women’s television production histories and the other on locating women in the archive, which I’m going to explore in more detail in this blog.  

Despite there being more papers on film than television, there were themes emerging through the conference which spoke to both media. One central concern was the difficulty in locating women in the archive, especially those not in prominent positions. The ordinary histories of women’s work are difficult to find in traditional archives, which we heard in BFI archivist, Lisa Kerrigan’s paper. Somewhat surprisingly, she noted that TV is the largest collection at the BFI. However, we heard that she rarely receives offers of work for acquisition from women, which is telling, and chimes with the lack of prominence of women’s work, as well as women’s perception of the limited value of their work. We also heard of worrying issues in navigating the archive and collection database, with difficulties over cataloguing, because of production hierarchies, which favour directors, as well as human frailties and structural problems.  

 Many of us will have examples of struggling to find archival sources, which we know should exist. For instance, in recent contact with the BBC Written Archives, I found there were no files on any of the women I was looking at, despite them being Heads of Department. It seems that acquisition strategies do not prioritise the keeping of records about such women.   

Morgan Wait from University College Dublin explained the challenges she’s faced in accessing archives because of economic and political issues, with archivists sometimes being unhelpful gatekeepers. This necessitates circumventing some institutional archives in Ireland, which have limited time and space and privilege broadcaster access over academics. She told us of having to become a ‘truffle hunter’, exploring the traces of women broadcasters in a whole host of archives, including the archives of men. Oral histories were highlighted as a particularly valuable source for women’s work.  

Alec Badenoch from Utrecht University advised looking for women in broadcasting, in alternative spaces, such as Women’s archives. However, there are difficulties in navigating the gaps you are likely to find. Women’s archives aren’t always ideal for storing media materials, because media is on the margins for them, and they don’t necessarily have the tools to make assets accessible. Conversely, the work of women is also at the margin of media archives, and so we encounter issues wherever we search.  

Taking the argument a stage further, Ipsita Saha from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, spoke of finding YouTube a useful alternative digital archive for her work on Indian television with the ‘Tabassum Talkies’, shared online by the presenter’s family. Informal collections on platforms like YouTube can be a rich source but are also vulnerable and of course uncatalogued.   

So, what can we do as academics to counteract the challenges of locating women in the archives?   

Events and public engagement were highlighted as one solution by Janet McCabe of Birkbeck, University of London. She spoke of the potential for activating histories through curation and display, to awaken a remembered past, particularly at moments of crisis. We can do we do this through creating ‘living archives’, such as the ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ event, a screened suffragette drama, encouraging the creative re-use of archives in new works. 

And there are other potential solutions, for instance creating our own ‘idiosyncratic archives’, to plug some of the institutional gaps. These could include recording oral and written histories of living subjects and displaying digital artefacts. My own website, which celebrates the programme making history of BBC Pebble Mill: http://pebblemill.org  is one such example: freely accessible, but with its own limitations and vulnerabilities. For instance, there are cases of similar enthusiast archives where historical materials are being lost for a second time, when citizen curators die or lose momentum.  

Another idea, which Alec Badenoch mentioned, is to pool our collective knowledge of the archives and complete a mapping exercise about which collections hold materials in which areas. This could make an attractive collaborative funding bid for the right partners. 

Additionally, encouraging archivists to make holdings about women more visible, by changing the way they catalogue items, or making ‘women’ an acquisition category, would be worthwhile. An alternative intervention could be alerting archives to the historical materials we may come across in our researches, and find homes for personal collections to avoid them ending up in a skip. 

Dr Vanessa Jackson

arch Under the Counter on Soho Radio

On 11 May 2023, Oliver Carter appeared on Soho Radio’s ‘The Soho Society Hour’ to disucss his latest monograph Under the Counter: Britain’s Trade in Hardcore Pornographic 8mm Films and specifically the role Soho played in this illicit film economy. A recording of the episode can be accessed here.

arch ATINER Conference on Communication and Mass Media, May 2023

The 21st Annual International Conference on Communication and Mass Media was held between the 8-11 May, ’23, in Athens, Greece. The conference, run by the Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) is sponsored by the Athens Journal of Mass Media and Communications, and provides regular opportunities for academics and researchers of Communications, Mass Media and other related disciplines to share and discuss their work. I was invited to deliver a remote paper titled “Samugam: The Sustained Relevance of Community Radio in India” on May the 8th, during a session moderated by Olga Gkounta.

This presentation took the 75th anniversary of Indian independence as an opportunity to reflect on radio’s progress in the country. I explored the medium’s development in India and considered its ongoing relevance in an increasingly post-digital world. Much of the presentation focused on the development of community radio and used Anna Community Radio in Chennai as a specific case study.

Anna Community Radio, owned and operated by Anna University, serves poor communities, particularly women, who live in low-income areas around the campus. The station has been recognised by the Indian government as one of the leading examples of the community radio movement. I profiled a collaborative media training initiative, funded by the British Council in 2022, which was established between Birmingham City University and Anna University. The project shared best practices in community radio broadcasting while encouraging students to create audio content. The project was titled ‘Samugam’, the word for community in the Tamil language. I discussed the various challenges and successes of the project, and played interviews with station management which I recorded in March 2023 on a visit to Chennai with Dr Siobhan Stevenson.

Here are excerpts from my interviews with Dr. I. Arul Aram, Professor and Head, Dept. of Media Sciences, and Dr. R. Lavanya, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Media Sciences, at Anna University, Chennai, India.

My paper argued for the ongoing relevance of community radio in India and pointed towards opportunities for its future growth. As the medium has continued to evolve and adapt to new technologies, community radio in India has been quick to embrace the use of social media, on-demand audio, streaming, podcasting, etc. Yet, while delivery platforms may have changed, the central principles of community broadcasting in India remain unchanged.

Anna Community Radio, Chennai

arch MusAct Conference, Helsinki, 2023

In May ‘23 the University of Helsinki held their first ‘Music, Research, and Activism’ conference, which brought together a range of researchers and practitioners engaged in activism around music. This three-day conference explored “the wide spectrum of music research that is committed to social and environmental justice, anti-oppression, and social change” and considered opportunities for combining academic work with activism. Keynote presentations included talks from the ecomusicology and sustainability researcher Aaron S. Allen, Chicana artivista, musician and feminist music theorist Martha Gonzalez, and feminist writer and social critic Minna Salami.

My paper, ‘Ballade de la Désescalade: Profiling Graeme Allwright as Activist’ was presented on the opening day, during a session on ‘Resistance and Community Organisation’, chaired by Marita Buanes Djupvik. I spoke about my research into the life and music of New Zealand born folk singer Graeme Allwright (pictured above), who rose to fame in France as an adaptor of protest songs by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, amongst others. Allwright’s work made the socialist themes of 50s, 60s American folk music accessible to French audiences and especially resonated with the ‘soixante-huitards’ who brought down the Gaullist regime in ‘68. My paper considered the distinctions between Allwright’s interpretations and the original works he translated, alongside assessments of his own protest related compositions. I outlined the various protest movements he was aligned to throughout his life and reflected on how these causes impacted on his musical output. Allwright’s repertoire was intensely humanist, anti-militarist, anti-nuclear, and anti-consumerism. Yet while he was well known in the 60s and 70s, I suggested that Allwright’s refusal to follow traditional artist/fan relationships led to his marginalisation in later life. My paper called for a reappraisal of Allwright’s position in the pantheon of ‘la chanson Francaise’, and as an influencer of French left-wing counterculture.

On the final day of the conference, I was delighted to chair a session which featured excellent papers from Aimée George (Surveillance and Strategy from contemporary South African women in jazz) and Melissa Arkley (“It’s metal as fuck to address these topics”: How women and non-binary extreme metal vocalists are using the conventions of extreme metal to do feminist activism).

My thanks to the organising and scholarly committee for all their work in arranging such an enjoyable conference, and to the Discipline of Musicology at the University of Helsinki, the Suoni Research Association, the Kone Foundation, and the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki for their support.