Ruth Adams takes parts in Museums Showoff

This week (Tuesday 14 May) Dr Ruth Adams was the first act up at a cultural industries event with a difference. Museums Showoff is an open mic night in a pub, at which ten speakers (predominantly museum professionals) give short, 9 minute talks showcasing their work, and sharing their enthusiasms with a like-minded audience. The night takes place in the upstairs room of a pub in Camden, and is more like a cabaret or a comedy club than an academic conference. It’s fun, informal and sometimes borders on the raucous.
Ruth’s talk was called ‘The Curious Tale of Tipu’s Tiger: Or the story of how a notorious man eating musical instrument was kidnapped from India and brought to London, to be immortalised in poetry, chocolate and cyberspace.’ Other speakers covered topics as diverse as tweeting Walruses, some very rude medieval badges, why Sherlock Holmes is wrong, and tiny horses made of cheese.

You can find out more about the event on their blog page here: http://scienceshowoff.wordpress.com/museums-showoff/ and in a recent article in The Guardian here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/may/10/museums-showoff-open-mic-night

Creative knowledge exchange

Profesor Andy Pratt gave a talk to creative practitioners on 30 April at The Culture Capital Exchange conference Research, Creativity and Business 2: Making the Extraordinary which took place at CASS Business School, City University. Andy spoke in a session on Cultures of creativity and innovation reporting on work associated with the project for the AHRC Hub, Creative Works London.
see http://www.theculturecapitalexchange.co.uk/the-culture-capital-exchange-presents/

Andy was happy to hear that he won a ‘creative voucher’ as part of the AHRC Hub.
A creative voucher is a funded project to enable knowledge exchange between academics and creative practitioners. Andy is working with John McKiernan of Platform 7 on a project.
See more details http://www.platform-7.com/#!academic/c22s5

ESRC Collaborative Studentship available

Elisabeth Kelan (Department of Management) and Rosalind Gill (Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries) have been successful in obtaining another Collaborative Studentship from the ESRC, to explore gender inequalities in work and organisations. The studentship, currently being advertised and with a start date of September 2013, is supported by ACCA and ESRC’s KISS-DTC (the Doctoral training Centre at King’s College London).

It will explore the disparity between the numbers of women entering the field of accountancy (50%) and their representation as senior members of the profession (21%), and examine the reasons for this.

This studentship is the second current success of this team in the Work and Organisation strand of KISS DTC.

Dr Kelan and Professor Gill are also supervising Scarlett Brown, who is funded by an ESRC Collaborative studentship in collaboration with Sapphire Partners and is examining processes of appointment to boards of FTSE350 companies from a gender perspective.

For more information about the PhD opportunity, see

http://kingsmanagement.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/esrc-studentship-2013/

Unequal Academia?

The Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries’ Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis Rosalind Gill will be speaking at Manchester Business School on 5 June 2013, as part of a day conference concerned with the position of women in academia. Her talk will draw on her much-read article on the ‘hidden injuries’ of the neoliberal University, and a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Cultural Economy.  
This event, organised by Marianna Fotaki, highlights the continued inequalities in higher education in Europe, where only 15 % of professorships are held by women, and women are disproportionately to be found in the lowest paid and most precarious parts of the Academy.

For the latest research about this subject see The Times Higher Education article by Jack Grove on 2 May 2013:  http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/the-global-gender-index/2003517.fullarticle

CMCI’s Professor Rosalind Gill attends the Future Sex conference

Future Sex?

CMCI’s Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis Rosalind Gill was a plenary speaker at the Future Sex conference held at UEL’s Docklands campus recently. Professor Gill spoke about her forthcoming book, co-authored by Meg Barker (Open University) and CMCI’s Dr Laura Harvey, on Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture.

Professor Gill also recorded a podcast this week as part of Toby Miller’s Cultural studies series, in which she talks about her work on sexualisation, cultural labour and academia. It can be heard via iTunes, Android, or iPhone under ‘culturalstudies’-subscriptions are free. 

Link: http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2013/05/01/rosalind-gill-on-sexualization-gender-cultural-labor-and-academics/

BBC Radio 2 features Cohen on jazz and film

CMCI’s Dr Harvey G Cohen appeared this week on BBC Radio 2 as part of a new documentary entitled “Jazz at the Movies,” hosted by British jazz performer Jamie Cullum.  Drawing from material from his book Duke Ellington’s America (University of Chicago Press), Cohen discussed how, during the 1930s, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra were featured in Hollywood movies earlier and more respectably than any other African American figures during the decade.  He also talked about Ellington’s excellent 1959 soundtrack for the Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder, and how it formed one element in Ellington’s many efforts of the period to fight nostalgia and create a new identity for senior citizens in the popular music world.

“Jazz at the Movies” was produced by Ian Parkinson, a long-time BBC producer and executive who Cohen brought to MA CCI to speak with students in November 2008.  The show will be on BBC iPlayer until next Monday, the address is below.  Cohen appears at the following times in the broadcast: 14:15-21:45, 35:20-37:00, 41:00-49:30, but the whole broadcast is really good and features a lot of excellent music: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01s42l7/Jazz_at_the_Movies_Episode_1/

Manifesto for the creative economy; Arts Policy rebooted

Professor Andy Pratt attended the launch of an important report yesterday on 23 April 2013 at NESTA. The Manifesto for the creative economy seeks to re-energise what has become a rather moribund topic in UK government circles. It contains a 10 point plan for action : http://www.nesta.org.uk/home1/assets/features/a_manifesto_for_the_creative_economy

The report follows on from NESTA’s Staying Ahead report (2007) which was the last attempt to keep the creative industries debate alive.

Andy notes that NESTA’s work in recent years, especially on innovation and city clustering has stressed an economic lens and the collection of economic data. The current report offers some updated economic data that clearly underlines, if such emphasis were needed, that the creative industries have outperformed the rest of the economy, and contribute close to 10% gross added value (that’s the economy speak for real earnings for the economy, that’s the same scale as the banking sector to get a sense of its import), and around 10% employment in the whole economy. In any period it would be an oversight to ignore this, but in a recession (and the creative industries have not gone into reverse like the rest of the economy) it’s perverse.

Andy points out that it is sad that whilst this report does keep the debate alive, it does not address the regional dimensions of the creative economy, or the international dimensions. Moreover, focusing still on the output aspects it ignores much of the process of the creative economy, its organization and labour conditions; as well as the relationship between the not-for-profit and informal sectors, and of course the arts more generally. All of these points are live in international debate on the creative economy, sadly not reflected in the UK which held a symbolic role in ‘leading’ the debate in this field.

In an unrelated press conference the Minister of Culture announced in her first speech on the arts today (www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/24/british-culture-commodity-maria-miller) that culture should be seen as a commodity, and that recognizing the exchange value of culture is the way forward in justifying its funding.
Andy comments: at last, after the storm of the Olympics and Leveson (which has buried the DCMS) we can hear the current administration’s views on culture. She also makes a strong case for cultural diplomacy. Both lines of debate have clearly been sui generis for the current administration, now we have them stated.

Creative Works, Knowledge and Locality

Professor Andy Pratt recently gave a paper at a conference of the American Association of Geographers in Los Angeles. Andy was participating in a panel on knowledge exchange in the creative economy, with colleagues from Canada, Germany and the US. Andy was reporting on work that is related to the AHRC Creative Works London project, part of which; Place, work, knowledge, that Andy has responsibility for directing. The conference was held at the Hotel Bonaventure, a building made famous by Jameson’s essay on postmodernity that uses it as a case study.

The conference took place from 9-14 April and was a massive event, the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers. Despite the title there were lots of international attendees from the fields of sociology and cultural policy. Andy had a particular interest in following strands on innovation and policy, especially those by Scandinavia, and German and Canadian colleagues who are pioneering debates in this field, and on creative cities. Allen Scott, one of the best-known writers in this field was being honored with a series of conference sessions. The ‘Martin Centre for the study of Prosperity’ , run by Richard Florida in Toronto, were also convening a session.

British Council, CMCI and the Americas

A recent report (see  http://creativeconomy.britishcouncil.org/Policy_Development/news/programme-refresh-americas/) from the The British Council’s Creative Economy newsletter is on the reshaping of its programme in the Americas, after delivering successful projects in the region for over a decade. Last month, a diverse steering group from the Americas and the UK met in Medellin – recently voted the world’s most innovative city – to discuss the future of the programme. David Codling, Regional Arts Advisor (Americas), reflects on a productive strategic meeting and looks ahead to a refreshed programme in the region.

Professor Andy Pratt was a member of the mission team, and is a member of the steering group of this important initiative.  Another example of CMCI helping to shape the future of the creative and cultural industries across the world.

The picture shows Biblioteca España, Medellín, Colombia. Incidentally, there is an architectural case study of this building in the book ‘”Culture: City” that Andy recently contributed to.

“The cultural and creative industries: new engines for the city?”

Professor Andy Pratt has a chapter in a book to accompany a series of events at the prestigious Akademie der Kunst in Berlin. It was curated, and edited, by internationally renowned architect and architectural writer Wilfred Wang who is based at the University of Texas, Austin. This publication draws on Andy’s lecture delivered in Berlin last year. Andy’s chapter ‘The cultural and creative industries: new engines for the city?” is a critical discussion of the role of the cultural and creative industries in urban redevelopment and the policy responses. It summarizes points that he has made in a series of papers in the past few years exploring the tensions between the built environment and social, economic and cultural processes. Other contributors to the book included Richard Sennett.

In addition to these introductory essays, the book contains a series of detailed architectural studies of cultural centers, museums and galleries across the world. This continues a line of Andy’s interdisciplinary and collaborative work that has sought to engage with architects and planners on the subject of the creative industries and cities. Readers will recall a recent chapter that Andy wrote for another international architectural survey book for ETH in Zurich, this book was entitled ‘City as loft’.

Pratt, A. C. (2013). The Cultural and Creative Industries: new engines for the city? Pp 36-42 in  Culture: City. Edited for the Akademie der Kunst by W. Wang. Berlin, Las Muller Publishers.