Museums and Urban Regeneration

CMCI’s Professor Andy Pratt has been busy presenting ongoing work about museums and urban regeneration.

He recently presented a joint paper at a seminar at LSE, written with Corinna Dean and Caroline Donnellan of LSE Cities Programme, entitled ‘The Tate Modern: pushing the limits of regeneration’. The paper discussed a range of tensions created within and without the museum through the multiplicity of audiences that the modern museum has to appeal to. The paper will be re-written for a special issue of Cities, Culture and Society on regeneration in London in the last decade.

He also presented a paper entitled ‘The museum, the cultural economy and the creative city‘ at a conference ‘Museums, the cultural industries & social inclusion: outlining & unearthing alternative perspectives’ supported by DCMS and ESRC, and Leicester University held at the Sackler Centre of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

MediaFest

CMCI joined with the National Media Museum to present “MediaFest”, which concentrated on the role of women in today’s media. The event as hosted by Professor Ros Gill, and also attended by our Media Liaison Officer, Fernanda Fain-Binda.

Fernanda reports a “stirring and provocative” key note speech from Emily Bell of the Guardian, who argued that changes in the media create more opportunities for women by breaking down institutional frameworks created by men.

This change was contrasted with the current state of women’s representation within the film industry, as Rachel Millward, CEO of Birds Eye View pointed out that statistically, the artistic and financial side of the movie business were still very much part of the old boys’ network.

Professor Gill’s presentation on her research of working conditions in the digital media industries had heads nodding across the conference.

Finally, a critique of Lady Gaga was made in the analysis on sexualised imagery, but Fernanda was quick to come to her defense!

Podcasts on the event will be available from the NMM shortly.

After the Fall

CMCI’s Professor Andy Pratt is one of the organizers of the “Creative Cities: after the fall of finance” event at the World Congress of Sociology in Sweden next year. He’s also calling for people to take part.

The session will explore whether the global financial crisis is changing prospects and policies for cultural and creative knowledge in different urban and national contexts.

They will also be asking whether the meltdown of finance is generating hardships or relief for cultural and knowledge ensembles -or perhaps even new opportunities for development?

Paper proposals should be sent to session organizers as well as the conference coordinators: Fernando Diaz Orueta, Fernando.diaz@ua.es and Kuniko Fujita, fujitak@msu.edu by October 31, 2009.

For more details, see: http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2010/rc/rc21.htm

Culture, Creativity -and Recession

Recession is all over the news –but what does this mean for the creative industries? Traditionally it was thought that culture and creativity would be the first victims of recession.

However, CMCI’s new Professor of Culture, Media and Economy Andy C. Pratt argues in a new paper that this has changed and we need to rethink the role of culture and the economy.

You can read all about it in Andy C. Pratt, “The Creative and Cultural Economy and the Recession,” Geoforum, 40(4) (2009): 495-496.

Andy says that the latest inflation data in the UK points to culture and leisure leading us out of the recession – and that this seems to confirm the hypothesis put forward in his paper. See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/18/inflation-higher-than-expected

Fragile

Current MA CCI student Alexia Achilleos is exhibiting at an exhibition called Fragile, the central theme of which is the humble cardboard box. There’s a map on the flyer above showing how to get to Post Gallery. CMCI people are all very welcome to the private view!

Welcome Mehita and Fred

Lost in CCI is delighted to announce the appointment of two more new members of staff. Mehita Iqani and Frédérik Lasage come to us from the London School of Economics, where they both completed their Doctorates -and at the same time managed to achieve teaching awards.

Dr Mehita Iqani comes from South Africa and her PhD thesis focused on the mediation of consumerism, magazine covers and newsstand spaces. Her research interests include visual culture, visual research methods, magazines, consumerism and consumption, media in public space, and independent creative production. On top of that, Mehita was the founding editor of ITCH, an online/offline creative expression magazine, backed by her experience in media entrepreneurship and media strategy consulting.

Dr Frédérik Lasage’s appointment represents something of a homecoming –he gained his MA in Cultural and Creative Industries with distinction here at King’s in 2005. Fred is a French-Canadian and researched his PhD thesis on the way in which art engages with new media. In addition to teaching at the LSE, he has taught at Cambridge University and Vassar College. While at King’s he interned at the Clore Leadership programme. Outside academia he has worked as a researcher for Proboscis in both the UK and Japan.

Both Mehita and Frédérik will be working as Teaching Fellows and Lost in CCI is delighted to have these excellent new colleagues join us here at CMCI.

Doctor Who in Korea

Dr Ruth Adams was recently filmed for a programme about public service broadcasting in the UK by KBS, the leading public broadcast company in Korea. KBS stated that it wished to learn from the example of the BBC, which, they say, is known to be the public broadcaster to maintain the highest standards in the world, with a trustworthy and quality output. The filming took place on Wednesday 26 August 2009.

Ruth was asked questions specifically about Doctor Who, one of the world’s longest running drama series, and a ‘flagship’ programme of the BBC. Doctor Who is not only very popular and able to command large viewing figures in the UK, but can also boast millions of fans around the world, and is becoming increasingly popular in Korea.

Ruth was asked what she believed to be the most creative and innovative aspects of the programme, in reply to which she emphasised the often daring and boundary pushing nature of the stories and characters, and the significant advances achieved in visual and sound effects, often on very limited budgets.

She was asked also the ways in which she believed the programme to be distinctively British. She suggested that the national character was perhaps apparent in the eccentric, yet pragmatic and resourceful personality of the Doctor himself, and that the programme had reflected the changing demographic and attitudes of the nation in its choice of companions for the Doctor, who now include strong, independent women and black and gay characters. She also noted that although the Doctor can theoretically travel anywhere in time and space, he quite often visits significant moments and figures in British history, and that his mode of transport is a British Police telephone box.

If Ruth’s contributions make the final cut, Korean viewers will be able to watch her on the evening of 3 September, when the programme is to be broadcast.

A Sound Research Resource

The British Library have launched their spoken word and music sound archive on line. They tell us that they are putting “thousands of rare, unpublished and out-of-print recordings” on line for UK academic and researchers.

The archive includes fine art, photography and design interviews in addition to ICA talks from luminaries including Salman Rushie, John Berger, and Germain Greer.

Lost in CCI’s favourite, of course, remains jazz singer Beryl “Queen of the Wasboard” Bryden.

For more information, go to www.bl.uk/sounds

Congratulations Joaquim!

Lost in CCI would like to congratulate Joaquim Negreiros on gaining his PhD.

Joaquim, who comes from Portugal and who was a journalist before beginning doctoral study, wrote his thesis on representations of family life in British lifestyle magazines under the supervision of Centre Director Dr Richard Howells.

His examiners were Shani Orgad from the LSE, and Pertti Alasuutari from the University of Tampere in Finland. Pertti is a leading international exponent of interpretive methodologies and critical discourse analysis, and also the editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, so this was a distinguished panel. He’s clearly earned his doctorate!

Congraulations, Dr Negreiros!

China in Context

Our friends next door at the The Courtauld Institute of Art in Somerset House are holding a two day conference on ‘Modernity’s Cultural Politics: China in Context’ .

Speakers are arriving from all over the world, and topics include media, film and the fine arts. The organisers are Dr. Julian Stallabrass and Jeannine Tang.

The conference takes place on October 23 and 24; the fee is £25 (£15 concessions and/or students) and pre-booking is required. You can get further information from ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk

CMCI graduate and research students might find this particularly interesting, and are always made welcome at Courtauld events.