Today a series of new academic posts at Birkbeck have been advertised, on the Birkbeck jobs website (which is due for an upgrade, don’t be put off!) and elsewhere, such as the Times Higher Education website. These look to be a great set of positions, many focusing on globalisation and the transnational, very apropos of … Continue Reading
Politicians and other performers: forthcoming presentation
In just a few weeks I will be presenting a paper at what looks like a very interesting symposium here at Birkbeck considering the increasingly important relationships between politicians and performance. I have pasted the programme, as well as my own abstract, below. Many of the other contributors will be drawing centrally on practices and … Continue Reading
Bloomsbury’s Gordon Square: Workplace becomes media production space
[Note: this post has been edited to remove details of the specific production in question. I’m being cautious as a colleague reminded me of a non-disclosure agreement to which I am indirectly a party. However I have decided not to remove the entire post, since the rest pertains to observations made in outdoor public space, … Continue Reading
It’s a wrap: Mediapolis roundtable on the urban in media theory
Just a quick note to say that the roundtable on ‘The Urban as Emergent Key Concept for Media Theory’ in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture has reached it’s conclusion. Now available are opening essays and responses from Zlatan Krajina, André Jansson, Myria Georgiou, Giorgia Aiello and me. Here’s an excerpt from my concluding … Continue Reading
Birkbeck announces Stuart Hall PhD scholarship
This has caught me by surprise, but I’ve just learned that my institution Birkbeck is offering a Stuart Hall PhD Scholarship for 2017-18, in partnership with the Stuart Hall Foundation. Some great news, making me proud to work at the institution (as, by the way, did the College’s recently-announced Bridges to Study programme for asylum … Continue Reading
The urban as emergent key concept for media theory: Mediapolis roundtable
Today a roundtable I have edited on ‘The Urban as Emergent Key Concept for Media Theory’ has been published online in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. This roundtable was initially spawned from a session at ICA 2016 in Fukuoka, Japan. In its journal form, it brings together contributions from five scholars (Zlatan Krajina, … Continue Reading
A wee little ethnography of ICA 2016
I’ve gone and done something I always wanted to do: write an ethnography of a conference; to be precise, one of the 2016 ICA conference in Fukuoka, Japan. Now, straight away, the proviso I’d make is that I’ve written one that is quite short and modest (UPDATE: and certainly it doesn’t merit the title of … Continue Reading
Second Mediapolis essay: ‘Small-gauge as remediating and metamedial’
My second essay within the special Mediapolis roundtable on ‘small-gauge’ scholarship, which has been running over the past few weeks, has now been published. It’s been a really interesting exchange which tries to confront and tease out the emergent notion of small-gauge scholarship, a term contained in the founding mission statement of the journal. If … Continue Reading
New Mediapolis essay: ‘Small-gauge as environmental and ordinary’
Over at the Mediapolis journal, I have published a short essay as part of a roundtable on the emergent notion of ‘small-gauge’ scholarship. The notion of small-gauge was alluded to in the founding mission statement of this new and experimental journal, and has since generated some substantial interest and debates. This roundtable tries to tackle … Continue Reading
The media-urban nexus: histories, stakes, possibilities (text of keynote paper)
Below is the text of a keynote paper given on Sunday 29 May 2016 for the ‘Mediating cityscapes’ symposium, held as part of the Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was an informal paper, in which I mainly was asked to open out some issues for the symposium. So I deliberately … Continue Reading