I must have been completely sleeping on this, but a film has been made about Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British media and cultural theorist, a key figure in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and later, a Professor of Sociology at The Open University (I remember fondly, from my short time there, working in a … Continue Reading
Alison Young seminar this week: Street art and the contemporary city
This week, as part of its Distinguished Visiting Speaker Seminar series, the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research will be hosting Professor Alison Young from the University of Melbourne, who will be speaking on ‘Street Art and the Contemporary City’. In the past I have assigned at least one of Young’s papers in my class The … Continue Reading
New material from the Wittgenstein Archives
Wittgenstein heads out there might be interested to note that the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) have made available a large numbers of papers and audio-visual materal (approximately 600 items in all) from the Kirchberg International Wittgenstein Symposia from the years 2001-2010, as well as from the Wittgenstein Archives publications series. The … Continue Reading
Hobsbawn reflects on his career at Birkbeck
One point of pride for me being based at Birkbeck is that it was the home of renown Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn for 65 years. Just one month before he passed away, he sat down with David Latchman, the Master of Birkbeck, to discuss the ways in which his research career intersected with the peculiarities … Continue Reading
Interviews and more at Figure/Ground
I’ve just noticed an interesting and relatively new website: Figure/Ground. Originally a personal academic blog, it has now evolved into a student-led collaborative project. The site aims to bring ‘philosophers, historians and critics of media, literature and technology into a conversation’ and to be ‘a virtual salon or coffee house, creating a democratic space for … Continue Reading
Mattern’s account of Media Places conference
When I first heard of the conference Media Places: Infrastructure | Space | Media I thought to myself, ‘how could I have missed hearing about that one!?’ The answer, I soon learned, was very simple: it was invite-only, as good events often necessarily are. Luckily, Shannon Mattern over at her blog Words in Space has … Continue Reading
Video of The Politics of War Reporting critical symposium
Above you can view the video of the critical symposium held last month to mark the launch of Tim Markham’s new book The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality (Manchester University Press), which I chaired and helped organise. The panelists, who brought forth some great and critical points for debate and discussion, were: … Continue Reading
Shaun Moores added as keynote for Conditions of Mediation preconference
Over at the Conditions of Mediation blog/website we have announced that Shaun Moores, Professor of Media and Communications in the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland has been confirmed as our sixth keynote speaker. Professor Moores is well-known, generally and to me as well, as one of the … Continue Reading
Barnett on the pragmatics of public attention
Over at his blog Pop Theory, Clive Barnett has written an excellent post working through some of his recent thinking on publicness. In the post, Clive questions the frequent tendency of debates about publicness to either explicitly or implicitly rely on a substantive and singular sense of ‘the Public’ being exposed or not exposed to … Continue Reading
Screening of new documentary Secret City
Though I think I might regrettably not be able to attend, tomorrow there is a free, public screening of what looks like a very interesting new documentary film titled Secret City. The result of a collaboration between documentary filmmaker and academic Michael Chanan and journalism and media researcher Lee Salter, the film takes an inside … Continue Reading