Media Research Seminar Series 2011/12
Media Research Seminar Series 2011/12
Semester 2
Tuesdays, 5.15-6.30pm
Grand Parade Board Room M2*
Grand Parade
University of Brighton
EVERYONE WELCOME
Tuesday 28 February 2012
'The Politics and Ethics of Listening in the Digital Age'
Dr Kate Lacey, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex
Listening has long been overlooked in both studies of the media and conceptualisations of the public sphere. It is a curious oversight, given the centrality of listening to communicative, experiential and public life. In fact, acoustic metaphors resonate through discussions of electronic and digital culture, so ‘listening’ rather than ‘reading’ might seem the appropriate term to encapsulate engagement with digital and electronic ‘texts’, in as much as it brings together notions of embodiment, intersubjectivity, liveliness and sensory perception with notions of an active and critical disposition. In other words, just as the term ‘audience’ has been appropriated in relation to visual as well as audio media, so ‘listening’ becomes an appropriate term for engagement with all media in the age of convergence.
The paper will set a discussion of listening in the digital age within a broader discussion of the ‘modernisation’ of listening since the revolutionary introduction of recorded and broadcast sound around the turn of the last century, and hopes to demonstrate that thinking about listening as an activity in public life opens up profound questions for the understanding of mediated experience, civic engagement and media ethics.
*This seminar will take place in G4, Grand Parade
Tuesday 20 March 2012
'Popular culture and anti-austerity protest'
Dr Rebecca Bramall, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, University of Brighton
The prevailing description of our times as an ‘age of austerity’ has hardened into an axiom with extraordinary rapidity. Focusing on contemporary popular and consumer culture in Britain, this paper makes a contribution to the task of subjecting the discourse of ‘austerity’ to the consideration it properly demands. I will discuss three dominant meanings of austerity: austerity as ‘responsible politics’, deficit reduction and coalition government policy; austerity as the ‘other’ that defines left-political struggle; and austerity as ‘austerity chic’. The latter points to a conception of austerity as object of desire, an element which I develop and use to question the currently dominant critical position in left cultural politics, the position of being ‘anti-austerity’.
Tuesday 17 April 2012
‘Networking the Sustainable Spectacle: Fish Fighting with Hugh’
Dr Mike Goodman, Senior Lecturer in Geography, Kings College London
This paper explores the cultural, political effects of a recent ‘good food’ campaign in the UK headed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one of its most famous ‘celebrity chefs’ designed to make the fishing industry more sustainable. Part of Channel 4’s yearly ‘Food Fight’, this ‘Fish Fight’ - backed up by separate, but related programmes by Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey and other celebrity chefs - sought to bring attention to ‘bad’ EU fishing policy, ‘by-catch’ and the need to change consumers’ tastes in order to reduce the impact of fishing on the planet.
Seen through the lens of the long and growing ‘celebrity networks’ of philanthropy, capital, personalities, media corporations, public policies and ecologies, this paper engages with the media context of the 'Fish Fight' and the impacts of its programme, website and campaigning to get a sense of the growing sophistication and political impact of celebrity chefs in the UK in the context of environmental and food policy. In particular, this paper discusses the ways that celebrity chef ‘capital’ is able - in conjunction with environmental NGOs and the performance ‘space’ of Channel 4, in this case anyway - to ‘discipline’ retail capital (eg Tesco) in important and far-reaching ways.
For further information contact Julie Doyle, j.doyle@brighton.ac.uk
Semester One
‘Televising Meritocracy– TV and the Ordinary Person in the 2000s’
Dr Guy Redden, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney
Tuesday 6 December 5.15-6.30pmGrand Parade Board Room M2
Popular television has long since been interested in ordinary people. However, recent reality genres have made the ordinary person the focus of programming. This paper recognizes the increased participation of ordinary people on TV while asking what the terms of such inclusiveness are. Considering arguments that the turn to the ordinary is driven by production imperatives more than any teleology of ‘cultural democratisation’, I develop a cultural economy view that takes aspects of the different approaches. I propose that rather than constituting an organic outpouring of the vox populi, the inclusion of ordinary people in the televisual realm is in accord with their usefulness to those cultural producers who control the meanings that circulate around their appearance. Such usefulness, though various in its forms, is marked by constant testing and judging of the person, and thus constant questioning of their value to the community, or, in other words, of their ‘merit’.