BCMCR Event Series – BCMCR Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities – Industry Perspectives

BCMCR invites you to the research event ‘BCMCR Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities – Industry Perspectives’.

Date: 11 December 2024 | Time: 16:00PM – 18:30PM UK TIME

Place: Parkside Building, P131 / Online via MS Teams

Tickets Available: In-Person/Online

Please note: MS Teams room link will be sent out as a calendar invite in an email. Please ensure to keep a look out for this email in your inboxes or check “junk” folders in case the email is sent there.

Event Bio:

Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) invites you to our industry panel responding to the BCMCR 2024-2026 research theme “Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities”. At this event we are delighted to host three industry experts, Corey Brotherson, Meera Darji, and Kate Knowles, who will be discussing their own practices and experiences in relation to the theme. Their practices span videogames, graphic novels, children’s books, documentary film, and local, narrative-led journalism.

The seminar will take place from 4pm-5.30pm, followed by a wine reception for in-person attendees.

Presenter Bios:

Corey Brotherson is an award-winning Birmingham based Freelance Writer, Editor and Creative Consultant who has built a 23-year career in the videogames industry writing for over a dozen companies, including PlayStation, King and Apple. He is the Narrative Designer/Writer for the in-development adventure game Windrush Tales, worked as Lead Narrative Designer for Surgent Studios’ Game Awards nominated Tales of Kenzera: Zau, and became a full voting member of BAFTA in 2022 after two consecutive years as a BAFTA Game Awards judge. Corey also is also the Editor for children’s book publisher Butterfly Books, and has co-created critically acclaimed graphic novels Magic of Myths, Clockwork Watch and Deadlier Than. He is currently penning his first novel, represented by YMU’s Anna Dixon. Many of the characters across Corey’s work feature transgressive identities, tapping into his own experiences, traumas and life challenges as a springboard to their creation. In this talk he explores how he helps other creators develop transgressive ideas within different media, how aspects of his characters break conformity across societal, gender, age and racial expectations, why he chose those aspects to reflect the themes and identities within his stories in the genres of fantasy, steampunk, sci-fi and fable, and how they were received by their audiences.

Meera Darji is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. She is a Lecturer and Practice-based researcher at Birmingham City University. Her independent documentary films have been awarded at international film festivals and recent experimental films have been exhibited at various exhibitions. Transindia: The story of India’s Hijras won the Royal Television Society Award for best factual in the Midlands, best short documentary at the Kashish Mumbai LGBT Festival in India and she was also nominated for the Sky Atlantic Grierson Award. Her research focuses on investigating kino eye and cinema verité techniques to present a more inclusive, and therefore, more ‘authentic’ voice in documentary practice. She experiments with ethno-sensory praxis combined with immersive technologies to tell real stories of marginalised communities in India. Current practice-based output that she is working on is Majoor 9195, a portrait on Indian female construction workers in Gujarat, India. Meera will be discussing how the current BCMCR theme of Transgressive Identities and subjectivities applies to her practice. She will be using the case study of her documentary Transindia: The story of India’s Hijras to explore the representation of the Hijra community, an identity which is often misunderstood. There will be a conversation around the challenges of subjectivity in the context of cinema verité techniques and how this impacts the nature of her transgressive films. This will also lead Meera elaborating on how transgression within the film has impacted wider society globally in a positive light through film festival distribution. However, she will also highlight how there are limitations with this approach as subjectivity is undoubtedly formed through building a rapport in the community and the editing selection process which in turn becomes a challenging concept in her practice.

Kate Knowles is the editor of The Dispatch, a local paper for Birmingham that launched in the autumn of 2023. After completing a masters in English Literature, she trained to be a journalist and worked for about 18 months at Birmingham Live. However, she really wanted to be a feature writer and was frustrated that there were very few local outlets that offered this. Also, that the UK media — especially local journalism — has been gutted since the digital publishing boom, with disastrous effect. Diminishing advertising revenues and the expectation that online news ought to be free are a couple of big reasons why local papers are less appealing to the readership they claim to serve. They tend to plaster websites with adverts, and to favour stories that have the potential to go viral, all while contributing to the normalisation of precarity for employees working in the sector. The Dispatch — which is one of six titles owned by the start-up Mill Media — can’t claim to solve all these problems, but what Kate set out to do was to create a place for Brummies (people from, or based in, Birmingham) to get journalism that is enjoyable, not frustrating, to read. This means focusing on quality over quantity — publishing a few, in-depth articles a week rather than lots of stories every day. It also means focusing hugely on the style of the writing, making it narrative-led so that readers, ideally, feel like they are reading a story (albeit one based on responsible reporting with all the due diligence that requires and a thorough editing process). To fund this journalism, The Dispatch relies mainly on subscribers who pay £8-per-month to access all articles, while roughly half are published for free. The Dispatch is now one year old and has 21,513 free subscribers and 1,033 paying members.