Category: Upcoming event

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THIS WEEK: New research from the University of Ibadan 

In this session, speakers from the University of Ibadan will share research they’ve been conducting in Media and Cultural Studies.

1600-1730 Wednesday 18 April
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link

Prof. Ayobami Ojebode (University of Ibadan) – Power to the Powerful, Not to the People: Explaining the Variation in Online Reactions to Chibok and Dapchi Schoolgirls’ Abductions in Nigeria

Prof. Nkechi M. Christopher (University of Ibadan) –  Assessing the influence of journalists’ role perception on the development of investigative journalism in Nigeria

Dr. Olusola O. Oyewo (University of Ibadan) – Teaching Business Journalism in the West African Sub- Region and its implication for uniformity/global standards

Dr. Beatrice A. Laninhun (University of Ibadan) – Exploring Advertising to Children across Cultures

Dr. Olayinka A. Egbokhare (University of Ibadan) – Analysing the Reportage of Yoruba News on Gender Based Violence – a study of selected Radio Stations in Ibadan. (Co Researcher- Abiola Odejide, PhD Emeritus Professor)

About the speakers:
Ayobami Ojebode is Professor of Applied Communication in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His research interests are community communication; community governance; new media; and political communication. His works have been published in reputable outlets in many countries. Professor Ojebode has been a visiting researcher, a visiting scholar, a keynote speaker, a consultant, a trainer and/or examiner in universities and research institutes in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Peru and the United States. Since 2014, he has been facilitating and coordinating advanced research methods workshops for researchers from all over Africa organised biannually by the Partnership for African Social Governance Research (PASGR) in Kenya. (ayo.ojebode@gmail.com)

Nkechi M. Christopher PhD, Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria teaches, researches and supervises studies in Communication and Language Arts, and is a book publishing expert and a literacy development enthusiast. Internationally, she taught English for two sessions (2013–2015) in King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah (KSA), has presented papers at conferences and has published in reputable journals. Locally, she successfully initiated and coordinated a six-month synthetic phonics trial sponsored by THRASS UK (2009), organised the 1st Mid-term Conference of the Reading Association of Nigeria (RAN) in 2007, among other sponsored activities and events. She became a full professor of her university with effect from October 2014 by a February 2018 pronouncement. (nmxtopher@gmail.com)

Dr Oyewo holds a PhD in Organisational Communication with focus on the informal network of relationship, Rumour within the organisation. He has been a university teacher for the past 21 years teaching courses which include Introduction to Human Communication Systems, Business/Organisational Communication, Comparative Media Systems, Investigative journalism, group communication system etc. He is a member of the Forum of African Media Educators under the auspices of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. He is also a Fellow of the Certified Institute of Marketing Communications in Nigeria. He is a consultant to various agencies including: UNICEF, Federal Ministries of Health, Information and Education. He is currently a Reader in the Department of Communication and Language Arts and has publications in reputable academic journals, both local and international. He has also supervised to completion, 8 PhD holders, and another two who are also at advanced stages in their research.

Beatrice Adeyinka Laninhun (PhD) teaches in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her teaching and research interests include marketing communications, speech communication, broadcast presentation and gender studies. She is a Fellow of the Certified Marketing Communications Institute of Nigeria, Member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, associate registered practitioner in Advertising and Member, African Council for Communication Education, Nigeria Chapter, among others. She was a visiting scholar to CAMRI, University of Westminster, United Kingdom. She has published in reputable international journals including Legon Journal of the Humanities, Third Sector Review, and Postmodernism problems.

Olayinka Abimbola Egbokhare holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in Communication and Language Arts University of Ibadan. She teaches and conducts research in Gender Studies, Marketing Communications, Health Advocacy and Promotions. She is the author of Dazzling Mirage, a novel which has been adapted for the big screen. She is presently on the Commonwealth Rutherford Fellowship at the Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick. She uses her creative writing skills for message development for Mental Health, Maternal Health and Preventing Mother to Child Transmission of HIV. She also works with Youths and partners with different organizations on issues relating to young people. She speaks in schools and public fora on literacy, health promotions and gender sensitization (especially the prevention of gender- based violence). As a gender focal person for University of Ibadan, she was on the team that developed the institutions’ Gender Policy and Sexual Harassment Policy.

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THIS WEEK: Current work in from researchers in the Screen Cultures cluster

In this session, speakers will share research initially presented at the Society for Film and Media Studies conference held in March 2018, in Toronto. Speakers will also report back on roundtables attended during the event itself.

Dr Hazel Collie (BCU) – “My Time”: Ageing television audiences, generation and memory

Hazel will present research from across two oral history interview projects (A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989 and Migration and Identity Narratives Told Through Television) which ask generationally dispersed television audiences to discuss their life narratives. In these discussions, the role of ageing texts in the construction of older television viewers’ life narrative and identity emerged strongly. In both research projects participants drew pleasure from discussing television texts which are still remembered post-production. Their discussions indicated that generation as a social category cuts across gender and ethnicity in individual memory work with television. They demonstrate the importance of aged and ageing television texts as a mechanism by which ageing audiences could discuss “my time” to locate themselves within their generational cohort and to express their individual identity as part of a broader generational identity and the values which they associate with this identity.

Dr Inger-Lise Bore (BCU) – Bringing Brent Back: Affective continuities, transmedia audiences, and the unfolding celebrity text 

Scholarship on transmedia storytelling often stresses the importance of continuity, consistency and seriality to producers and audiences of fictional worldbuilding. But how might such notions apply to non-fictional transmedia texts such as brands and celebrities? We explore this question through a case study of British comedian Ricky Gervais and his 2016 film Life on the Road, which revives his most famous comic character – David Brent from mockumentary sitcom The Office (BBC 2001-03). We identify a recurring narrative of a declining celebrity-comedian returning to a character that had previously been associated with critical acclaim and great cultural significance. Here, Life on the Road became a litmus test for Gervais as comic author/performer, and participants used their affective encounters with the film to trace the direction of his celebrity narrative.

Connor Winterton (BCU) – Reporting on ‘Queer Sex and Contemporary Cinema’ Roundtable

Connor will be reporting on the round-table that he organised and chaired at the 2018 SCMS Annual Conference. The round-table discussion is centred on ‘Queer Sex and Contemporary Cinema’ and will offer a critical and unique evaluation of how modern cinema is representing ‘queer sex’ in films such as Stud Life (dir. Campbell Ex, UK, 2012), Stranger by the Lake (dir. Alain Guiraudie, France, 2014) and Carol (dir. Todd Haynes, USA, 2015). The table of experts, made up from a variety of institutes and countries, will unpick what the term ‘queer sex’, how queer sex is stylistically presented in modern cinema, how the sex acts fit in with genre and narrative more broadly, as well as issues to do with visibility and authenticity.

About the speakers:

Dr Hazel Collie is a lecturer in media theory at Birmingham City University. She researches television audiences and is interested in gendered and generational identity, memory and feminine cultures.

Dr Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media at Birmingham City University and member of the Screen Cultures research cluster in BCMCR. She has published work on comedy audiences and media fandom, and she is the author of Screen Comedy and Online Audiences (Routledge, 2017).

Connor Winterton is a PhD Researcher in the Birmingham School of Media, where he also tutors and lectures part time. Connor holds degrees from the University of Leicester and University of Birmingham, where he was educated and trained primarily in Film Studies. Connor’s current PhD research is centred on representations of sex in contemporary gay, lesbian and queer film. Connor is also an editorial board member for Mai: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture.

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THIS WEEK: Nick Hall and Andrew Flinn on ‘Public History and Historical Reconstruction’

BCMCR Research Seminar | History, Heritage and Archives
Archives, Public History and Historical Reconstruction
1600-1730 Wednesday 21 March
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link

Dr. Nick Hall (Royal Holloway) – ADAPT: Using hands-on technological simulation to communicate television’s clockwork past to future digital users

The tools required to make and share moving images are ubiquitous in the developed world. Smartphones and high-speed wireless internet connections enable users to shoot video and share the results globally. The ease and speed of the digital age has multiplied the potential producers and audiences of video. Similar technological changes have changed the television industry beyond recognition: digital tapeless acquisition and desktop editing are now dominant technologies across genres.

Television production has always been somewhat opaque to audiences, but the recent growth in portable consumer video recording technology further obscures the mechanical and manual foundations of television production practice. As recently as the 1960s, a great deal of television footage was shot and recorded using clockwork film cameras, magnetic audio recorders, and analogue video tape. Shows were edited by hand with the aid of a wide range of mechanical editing aids. Assistant editors performed complex jobs now simplified by non-linear editing software suites such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere.

In the age of digital cameras and desktop video editing, the manual work of television production is at risk of being forgotten. Analogue technologies and workflows are increasingly incomprehensible to new generations raised on the smartphone and tablet. To remedy this, ADAPT – a five year research project funded by the European Research Council and led by Prof. John Ellis at Royal Holloway, University of London – is carrying out extensive research designed to capture and animate the hidden histories of historic television production.

ADAPT’s central innovation is to carry out a series of simulations in order to show how arrays of technological devices were used by teams of skilled professionals to make, edit, and broadcast television in the United Kingdom between 1960 and 2010. The project reunites teams of veteran television personnel – including camera operators, sound recordists, and film editors – with obsolete equipment, and captures the results as the subjects re-encounter equipment they have not used for decades.

This presentation will include footage captured during recent simulation exercise, which demonstrate how 16mm television footage was shot and edited during the 1960s. The presentation will address the manifold opportunities and methodological challenges associated with this novel mode of “hands-on” oral history, and consider the ways in which memories of past television production may be translated and interpreted for contemporary audiences.

Dr. Andrew Flinn (UCL) – Digging Where We Stand: community-based archives & participatory approaches to archiving and knowledge production

Drawing upon the speaker’s extensive experience of working with community archives and study of participatory knowledge productive practices this talk will contend that the history and practice of community-based archives suggests that rather than centres for preservation of culture many of these participatory approaches represent an activist agenda of use and knowledge production. The talk will use the framework of Lindqvist’s Dig Where You Stand manifesto and examples of social movement approaches to archiving and the useful past to illustrate the motivations, objectives and activities of both mainly physical and digital archives. The talk will conclude by raising some questions about the challenges and future of these participatory archives.

About the speakers:

Dr. Andrew Flinn is a Reader in Archive Studies and Oral History at University College London and author, recently of ‘Working with the past: making history of struggle part of the struggle’ in Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History’s Schools, eds Choudry & Vally (2018).

 Dr. Nick Hall is a research officer in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway (University of London). He works on on the ADAPT project which examines the historical development of British television broadcast production technology. His research specialisms include early postwar American television history and cinematography and British postwar television history. A book based on his research into the history of the zoom lens in American film and television – The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2018. www.zoomlenshistory.org.uk.

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THIS WEEK: David Gange and Dima Saber on ‘Cultural translation, history and loss’

BCMCR Research Seminar | History, Heritage and Archives
Cultural translation, history and loss

1600-1730 Wednesday 14 March
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link

Dr. David Gange (University of Birmingham) – Sea Sites in Island History: Exploring the Lost Communities of Atlantic Britain and Ireland
There are many more once-inhabited islands in the British and Irish archipelago than there are cities. Many of these had been populated for centuries before a flurry of abandonment between 1850 and 1930. Such islands are lined with ruins: but-and-ben homes, field systems, water mills, abandoned boats, fish traps and shell middens from before the age of buildings. Nineteenth-century people here lived, consciously, in iron age and neolithic landscapes. The coasts are thickly layered in names – Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Norse, Scots, Welsh, occasionally even English – that preserve their history of usage. Regions where such islands predominate are richly served by historical archives so that it’s often possible to link an island ruin to families who used it and the processes that ended its productive life. Those who abandoned an island such as Havera, Shetland, in the 1920s can be heard discussing the joys and challenges of island life in the uniquely rich oral history collections of these regions. This paper explores the processes of researching such communities, but also asks what vision of British and Irish history might be developed by seeing the nineteenth century – the moment when Britain was turned inside out by the advent of roads and rail, and small islands became for the first time in their history ‘remote’ – from their perspective.

Dr. Dima Saber (BCU) Resistance-by-Recording: The disappearing archives of the Syrian war 
This paper will present the early findings of the ‘Resistance-by-recording: the visuality and visibility of contentious political action in the Arab region’ project after the first round of ethnographic work in Berlin in November 2017. Focussing primarily on the consequences of YouTube’s new algorithm to limit the proliferation of material considered graphic or supporting Jihadi propaganda, I will also explore the costs of the Syrian activists’ over-reliance on the current affordances of digital platforms and the challenges this precariousness poses for the preservation of a citizen-generated memory and history of the Syrian war.

About the speakers:
Dr. Dima Saber is a Senior Research Fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Her research is focussed on media depictions of conflict in the Arab region, and she is responsible for leading and delivering projects in citizen journalism, particularly exploring the relation between digital media literacy and social impact in post-revolution and in conflict settings such as Egypt, Palestine and Syria.

Dr. David Gange is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham. His books include a history of Egyptology, Dialogues with the Dead (Oxford, 2013) and The Victorians: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2016). He is currently working on a book that involved kayaking all the Atlantic coastlines of Britain and Ireland across 2016-17, The Frayed Atlantic Edge (Harper Collins, 2019).