Makings journal launch

This seminar introduces the latest issue of Makings journal. The issue, released late last year, is centred around the theme of “Disruption”. By adopting this theme, we aimed to capture a wide range of disruptive events that have been happening to and within the cultural and creative industries in recent years. We will be joined by some of the contributors to the issue, who will introduce their contributions. We will also be joined by the co-editors of the first ever special issue of the Makings journal, which is centred around creative higher education curriculum and pedagogy.

Marley Treloar will introduce her paper Recycle Archaeology: Community Reuse of Archaeological Disposals. See abstract and contribution here.

Leona Heimfeld will present a snapshot of contemporary streaming and consider how distracted viewing has become normalised for some young women since the pandemic. While distraction was noted from early studies of cinema and television spectatorship, Leona will link contemporary viewing to Netflix’s encouragement of interaction through frictionless controls. Seeking to contextualise viewing on streaming sites within wider developments in spectatorship, Leona considers how the pandemic has accelerated distraction by blurring boundaries between work, school and home. Finally, Leona explores commercial opportunities for interrupted spectatorship on streaming sites.

Sophie Swoffer will present her contribution titled It’s Us!: Embracing Disruption through Feminist Approaches to Video Editing. See abstract and contribution here.

Hanna Klien-Thomas and Maica Gugolati will introduce their article The Im/Possibilities of Digitalising Caribbean Carnival. London’s Notting Hill Carnival experienced major disruptions due to the pandemic legislation and Covid-19-related limitations. Following the cancellation of its parade and most related events in 2020 and the partial cancellation in 2021, a wide variety of online formats related to Carnival emerged. Our contribution to Makings presents the results of an exploratory research study into how carnival practitioners and participants negotiated disruptive experiences and their relationships to digitization. Based on onsite and online fieldwork research conducted during the Carnival season 2021, we highlight how social actors perceived changes in their carnival practices. In our presentation, we will discuss experiences of using digital media that creative professionals have shared in terms of opportunity and constraint as well as multi-sensory embodied memories from offline participation in the Notting Hill carnival that were central to convey loss in the pandemic moment. Our research thus seeks to provide insights from a micro-perspective on how Carnival, with its localized aesthetic and performativity, is renegotiated, accepted, or rejected in the digitalscape.

Tiffany Bale will discuss the paper titled Building Back Better?: The Possibilities of Change and Role of the Union for the UK Film and Television Costume Workforce. See abstract and contribution here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Marley Treloar is a PhD researcher at Coventry University studying hybrid digital participatory practice and community engagement. She graduated from Kingston University MA Museum and Gallery Studies in 2019 and has worked across the arts and heritage sector working as a freelance Curator and Education and Engagement officer. Marley is a member of the Artworks Alliance participatory network and Museums Association.

Leona Heimfeld is a mature part-time PhD student in Film at Exeter University, supervised by Professors Linda Ruth Williams and Fiona Handyside. Leona has been Head of Film at Northampton High School. Prior to teaching, Leona was a theatre director at the Royal Court, Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Artistic Director of Polyglot Theatre Company, which examined the experiences of refugee communities. Leona studied Film, English and Drama at Bangor University, completed an MA in Teaching at Leeds, and a PG Certificate in Applied Drama at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Leona is a founding member of the Film/making Education Special Interest Group at BAFTSS. She presented papers on Pause as Progress at the Kings College London PGR conference in June 2021 and on Cancelling the Male Gaze at Fandom Post-#MeToo in Paris in July 2022.

Dr Sophie Swoffer is a performance artist and lecturer in performance at Sheffield Hallam University. Sophie’s work in interdisciplinary and draws on both Performance and Film Studies in order to re-envisage the male gaze. Sophie has guest edited The International Journal of Creative Media Research’s special edition of Exploring Creative Methodologies (June 2020) and has also published to the international Body, Space, Technology journal (2021) and Makings journal (2022).

Hanna Klien-Thomas is a Research Fellows for the Creative Industries Research and Innovation Network at Oxford Brookes University, interested in popular culture, audiences and digital media practices. Her PhD project on Bollywood audiences in the Anglophone Caribbean was funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and she was an affiliate scholar at the Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies. Her current research project focuses on experiences of digitalisation in UK Caribbean Carnival spheres.

Maica Gugolati is an affiliated researcher at IMAF Institute of African Worlds, Paris France. Her PhD was in anthropology of art and performance specialized in the carnival of Trinidad and Tobago (WI). She is currently working experimentally between art and research on individual and collective fieldwork based projects. She is a Co-editor of African Diaspora Journal, Caribbean In-Transit Journal and co-educator of Decolonial Dialogues. Gugolati takes part to AICA, Art Curator International Association for the South Caribbean regional team; she works as an independent art curator, author and artist.

Tiffany Bale is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). Her research looks at the careers of women in UK film and television costume departments. Tiffany has recently completed data collection for her thesis entitled, ‘Gender and participation in the UK’s film & TV costume workforce’ using interviews and work audio diaries. Prior to commencing PhD research, she worked as a costume maker in high-end television.