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arch AHRC Midlands4Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award: Re-imagining the arts festival in times of crisis

Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDAs) are co-designed between an M4C university and an external partner organisation. CDAs offer a project with established research aims, responding to particular needs in the cultural, creative and heritage sectors. The supervisory teams are pre-established and are made up of academics from a Midlands4Cities university and a member of the external partner organisation. A Collaborative Doctoral Award allows you to:

-produce a quality thesis under expert academic and partner supervision
-gain first-hand experience of partner organisations outside the university environment
-enhance employability and skills.

The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University is inviting applications for students interested in a CDA entitled “Re-imagining the arts festival in times of crisis.” This research will be undertaken in association with the British Arts Festivals Association (BAFA) and supervised by Profs Nick Gebhardt and Tony Whyton. For full details about the project and applying please visit: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/find-a-project/

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arch AHRC Midlands4Cities PhD funding for UK and International Applicants 2021-2022

AHRC Midlands4Cities PhD funding for UK and International Applicants 

The AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M4C) brings together eight leading universities across the Midlands to support the professional and personal development of the next generation of arts and humanities doctoral researchers. M4C is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, University of Warwick, Coventry University, University of Leicester, De Montfort University, Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

Through our Open Doctoral and Collaborative Doctoral Awards Midlands4Cities will fund and support outstanding research for 109 doctoral researchers across the breadth of Arts and Humanities starting in October 2022.

There are 93 PhD studentships available through an open competition and M4C is also awarding 16 Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDA) which provide diverse and unique project opportunities with national, regional, and local partner organisations. UK, EU, and International applicants are eligible for both routes for 2022 entry.  Further details on the funding provided are available on the M4C website.

The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University is inviting applications from students whose research interests connect with our fields of expertise in:

Creative Industries

  • Alternative and marginal economies
  • Cultural entrepreneurship
  • Cultural policy and media regulation
  • Craft making and production practices
  • Equality and diversity

Cultural Theory

  • Migration and refugees
  • Old and new racisms
  • Populism and nationalism
  • Feminist and queer politics; African feminisms, masculinities
  • Postcolonial theory; imperial legacies
  • Posthumanism
  • Higher education institutions as sites of neoliberalisation but also resistance to it
  • Social movements
    The politics of voice and listening
  • The politics of time; rhythm, speed/slowness
  • Practice-based research, including artistic and curatorial practice

Game Cultures

  • Historical game studies
  • Video game narratives and adaptation
  • Posthumanism and video games
  • History and (video)game communities, including fan cultures
  • Video games and cultural policy
  • Games and national/transnational identity

Gender and Sexuality

  • Sexualised masculinity
  • The histories of adult film production across Europe
  • Gay men’s use of dating apps
  • Digital intimacies
  • Sex in cinema
  • Fetish communities

History, Heritage & Archives

  • Media as historical source
  • Media archives and the challenges online archives pose for media historians and archivists
  • Refugees, migrants, media history and archives
  • Commemoration and everyday media memory
  • The archive, amateur film and place

 Jazz Studies

  • The cultural meaning of jazz
  • Studies of jazz as a transnational practice
  • Improvisation and cultural practice
  • Jazz on television and radio
  • Archives and documentation
  • Mediation and technology
  • Jazz and philosophy
  • Festivals

Media & Place 

  • Media and conflict
  • Hyperlocal media narratives
  • Media, populism and nationalism
  • Community media practices and the politics of space
  • Digital media and feminism
  • Media, migration and displacement

Popular Music Studies

  • Popular music consumption
  • Songwriting
  • Music scenes
  • Heritage and cultural memory
  • Mediation and representation
  • Media and technology
  • Music industries
  • Material cultures
  • Experimental writing

Screen Cultures 

  • Marginal, subcultural and cult modes of screen production and consumer
  • practices.
  • The gendering of media audiences and the gendered processes of fandom.
  • Film festival and distribution activities in screen research.
  • Documentary filmmaking as production research perspectives.
  • The history and developments of sexual culture through screen media.
  • National and transnational traditions of cinema beyond Hollywood.

The deadline for AHRC funding applications is 12 January 2022 – 12.00 hours (UTC+0).  Applicants must also have applied for a place to study at one of the eight M4C universities.  For full details of eligibility, funding, research supervision areas and CDA projects, and for dates of our November application writing workshops, please visit http://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk or contact enquiries@midlands4cities.ac.uk .

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arch Call for Papers: Regulation of Old and New Media Forms in Africa

Conference on the Regulation of Old and New Media Forms in Africa

Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
Birmingham City University
May 2022
Location: Zoom

Conference Theme: Regulating African Digital Media

Increasingly more African countries are instituting laws, procedures, and policies, seeking to regulate the media ecosystem. Governments typically justify such approaches to regulation as a way to combat the negative consequences of online media usage, such as hate speech and mis/disinformation. This trend generally reflects the historical application of censorship laws that have targeted the critical press and journalistic autonomy (Obijiofor et al., 2016). The implications of this are considerable. What we are witnessing is the integration of two regulatory paradigms – for the traditional and digital media – into one, with the potential for state authorities to expand blanket censorship from media to citizen expression in ways that mirror the politics of regulation. A central issue at play here is the struggle over the appropriation and exercise of power over collective voices, with consequences for democracy, plurality, independence, dissent, and freedom.

No doubt, media and digital regulation have intensified in recent years across the globe in what has been described as the “regulatory turn” (Flew et al., 2021, p. 208). The aim, it seems, is to manage the disruptive effects of the usage of media technologies. What has been largely overlooked, however, is an overarching investigation of this trend in Africa. This is in spite of the reality that state interventions such as social media bans, which are becoming common on the continent, are disruptive in themselves. Meanwhile, the few scholarly collections which have examined separate angles of the subject have done so predominantly from the traditional media lens only (Chan-Meetoo, 2013; Sampaio-Dias et al., 2019). For instance, Chan-Meetoo’s (2013) edited collection considers how African journalists negotiate regulatory and ethical requirements demanded of them. Other works have looked at regional or linguistic peculiarities in traditional media regulation on the continent (de la Brosse and Frére, 2012; Limpitlaw, 2021). What has also been neglected is the fact that new media platforms are mainly domiciled in the West, bearing implications for digital sovereignty in Africa.

Furthermore, research centred on Africa has barely considered emergent regulatory practices that cover the traditional media, online harms, social media, blockchain technologies, privacy concerns, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the wider internet of things. This conference thus creates a space for researchers to build on previous scholarly work and to share, discuss and debate contemporary regulatory interventions in media technologies across Africa in attempts to regulate disruption, and their impact on societies. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Press and broadcasting regulation
  • Social media regulation and online harms
  • Online broadcasting regulation
  • The politics of regulation
  • Internet and social media bans
  • Regulation as disruption
  • Regulating/regulated disruption
  • Platform governance and self-regulation in Africa
  • Regulatory frameworks, methods, and methodologies
  • Online privacy and data concerns
  • Regulation, the balance of power, and digital sovereignty
  • Punitive media registration
  • African Union, multi-stakeholderism, and media regulation
  • Regulating artificial intelligence and other new media technologies in Africa

We also invite conceptual papers and reflections on alternative, and perhaps homegrown approaches that can be exploited at the national and/or regional level on the continent to address the challenges of media and digital regulation.

Abstract Submission

Please send a 300-word abstract proposal for a 20-minute presentation by 14 January 2022 to regulationafrica@protonmail.com.

Proposers will be notified of the outcome of the selection by 7 February 2022.

Abstracts should be in MS Word format and should include name, position, institutional affiliation, email address of proposer(s), and a 150-word biography.

Conference Details

Conference registration will open in early April 2022 and the conference schedule will be released afterwards. The conference will be held on Zoom and will be organised weekly in a panel format in May 2022. To make this work, a single panel (90 minutes long) will be scheduled for each of the Tuesday afternoons (UK time) in May 2022. Further details on timing will be confirmed to selected participants.

Special Issue Publication

Shortly after the conference, we will invite full papers based on the presentations for publication in a journal special issue to be announced. In your abstract submission, please indicate whether you would like your contribution to be considered for the special issue publication. Interested contributors should please note that full papers will be requested by September 2022.

About BCMCR

The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) was established in 2009 to develop excellent research as a core activity within the Birmingham School of Media. Our team of independent researchers at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) generates work of internationally excellent standard. BCMCR aims to produce distinctive, collaborative work within the field of media and cultural research.

References

Chan-Meetoo, C. (2013) Media Ethics and Regulation: Insights from Africa. Bamenda: African Books Collective.

de la Brosse, R. and Frére, M. (2012) Media regulation in sub-Saharan Africa: trends and stakes in French-speaking countries. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 33(3), pp. 74-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560054.2012.732259

Flew, T., Gillett, R. and Cole, R. (2021) Editorial. Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 12(2), pp. 207-214. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00059_2

Limpitlaw, J. (2021) Media Law Handbook for Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

Obijiofor, L., Murray, R. and Singh, S. (2016) Changes in journalism in two post-authoritarian non-Western countries. The International Communication Gazette, 0(0), pp. 1-21.

Sampaio-Dias, S., Mabweazara, H.M., Townsend, J. and Osman, I. (2019) Practices, policies and regulation in African journalism: mapping a research agenda. African Journalism Studies, 40(3), pp. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2019.1750197

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arch Recording of ‘No Sex Please, We’re Facebook’ now available

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arch Recording of ‘Podcasting, discoverability and listener engagement’ now available

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arch Recording of ‘The UK Live Music Industry in a post-2019 era: A globalised local perspective’ now available

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arch Materialities Theme Pamphlets Now Online

After much delay, a collection of research cluster-specific takes on the 2019-20 Materialities research theme are now available digitally here.

These pamphlets bring together a wealth of perspectives on materialities, and showcase the breadth and depth of thinking that exists across multiple BCMCR research clusters. Credit goes to Maggie Urbaniec for her work on the final designs.

A limited run of physical copies will follow in late 2021.

An edited collection of essays emerging from the theme, co-edited by Iain Taylor and Oliver Carter and entitled Media Materialities: Form, Format and Ephemeral Meaning will be published by Intellect Books in 2022.

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arch Rate and Review – A Replicable Method For Podcast Research

Along with my BCMCR colleague, Dr Simon Barber, I’m currently writing a journal article around the use of podcasts in contemporary music reception practice.

The research behind the article has involved the collection and analysis of data related to podcasts in the Apple Podcasts charts for music. During the course of undertaking this work, I have developed a replicable workflow for gathering, analysing and visualing that data.

For the purposes of the article we are writing, we gathered data on ~9,000 podcast episodes and ~16,000 reviews, and then ran the data through a number of unsupervised machine learning algorithms, including Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis. The results are displayed in this interactive document which has enabled us to explore the contents of the reviews and the overall results of computational analyses.

The article is currently in peer review and we hope to have positive news on that soon. In the article, we make the case that the replicable workflow developed as part of this research has potential uses for other researchers interested in podcasts. Towards that, I have created a series of tutorials that provide walkthroughs and all code required to replicate to workflow we used. These are available over on my personal website:

  • Part 1 – Describes the collection of data.
  • Part 2 – Walks through the process of analysing the data using Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis.
  • Part 3 – Visualises the results of those analyses.
  • Part 4 – Describes how to create an interactive document enabling exploration of results.

If you are interested in researching podcasts, please feel free to use, share and adapt any of the code or processes contained within the tutorial series.

Dr Craig Hamilton

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arch Riffs – Volume 5, Issue 1 – Popular Music Fiction.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Volume 5, Issue 1 of Riffs- Experimental Writing on Popular Music. 

This issue is guest edited by Ash Watson, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, UNSW Sydney, and it focusses on Popular Music Fiction. The issue contains 7 pieces that use fiction to explore ideas related to record collecting, AI in music, and more.

This particular issue comes with a choice of front covers – Dystopian and Utopian – which reflects the broad themes explored by our fantastic team of contributors. Both versions of the cover art are displayed below, along with a download link to a free copy.

Riffs Vol5 Iss1 Utopian

Riffs Vol5 Iss1 Dystopian

For more information on Riffs, visit the journal website.