Dear colleagues
I’m pleased to share this term’s schedule of research seminars hosted by the Communications programme at the University of Exeter. All sessions are available to join via Zoom.
For further details, please contact Neil Ewen ([log in to unmask]) or Alex Taylor ([log in to unmask])
Wednesday 16 February 2022, 4.00 – 5.30pm. Zoom.
‘Hot Data: Thermal mediation and the politics of digital distribution at “the edge of cloud”.’
Julia Velkova, Linköping University
Zoom link: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/94402251635?pwd=WERzOUlkOE8wcHYvTnpFRHFlaFZtQT09
Meeting ID: 944 0225 1635
Password: 273219
Datafication is commonly associated with processes of quantifying society through practices of user surveillance, logics of prediction and automated-decision making. Yet, datafication is also dependent on multiple economies of energy production and distribution that capacitate the operations of media infrastructures underlying “Big Data”, such as data centers. In this talk I explore the interrelation between the economies of data processing and the economies of energy that help sustain datafication, by discussing practices of thermal mediation and distribution of heat that take place at the “edge” of “cloud computing”. Drawing on perspectives from feminist technoscience and media audience labor, I discuss cases and examples of practices of server heat distribution through decentralized data centers in France and Finland. I show how approaching data through a particular energy form that its processing activates – heat – illuminates the production of new user publics who are assembled to labor and maintain the data economy through an embodied, thermal relation with data, and the need to discuss the politics of difference and value that are activated in this process.
Julia Velkova is associate professor of media and communication studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her work on the temporalities, energy politics and human work in data centers has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, and Information, Communication & Society among other venues. She is currently involved in four research projects that concern different intersections of energy and digitalisation from a sociotechnical perspective. She is also co-editing the book Media Backends: Critical Studies of the Other Side of the Screen together with Lisa Parks and Sander De Ridder (forthcoming with University of Illinois Press).
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Wednesday 2 March 2022, 4.30 – 6pm, on campus (tbc) and Zoom
“Women Are Angry”: Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years
Hannah Hamad, Cardiff University
Zoom link:
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/91960063233?pwd=Z0E1ZG51TUJSbW9WL0tWVFdvVUdOdz09
Meeting ID: 919 6006 3233
Password: 222244
In November and December of 1980 cinemas across the UK that were then screening high-profile films like The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) and When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979), were picketed, stormed and egg-bombed by assembled members of activist women’s groups such as Women Against Violence Against Women. Meanwhile, poster hoardings that advertised these films and others using depictions of women’s fear of men’s violence as key selling points were vandalised with graffiti and slogans like “Women Can Fight Too” and “This Violates Women.”
This direct action gave rise to the arrest and (in some cases) prosecution of many of these women on a range of trumped-up charges, and it was accompanied by local, national and international coverage in the news media and the film industry trade press. These women’s groups were protesting what they then understood to be film culture’s complicity in normalising imagery of violence against women in everyday spaces and places. And in ways that they believed contributed to fostering an environment that enabled the perpetuation of the continuing social problem of misogynist violence, which was at that time seen as being epitomised by the flashpoint status of the then ongoing ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders that had, by then, blighted the north of England for over five years.
With a particular focus on elucidating and contextualising the cinema protests of 1980, this talk investigates some of the ways in which UK film culture became a focal point for feminist campaigning during the Yorkshire Ripper years. Shining a light on an important part of UK women’s liberation movement history as it intersects with the cultural history of film, and drawing on archive research and interviews, it explores the relationship between film and feminism in Britain at that time, arguing that the Ripper attacks, and the cultures of masculinity that contributed to enabling them, are key contexts in relation to which this relationship must be understood.
Hannah Hamad is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University and a member of the editorial collective of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2014) and Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years (London: BFI/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023).
***
Wednesday 16 March 2022, 4.00 – 5.30pm, Zoom.
‘Pranking Nigel: Unruly Nationalism, Celebrity Cameos, and Post-Brexit Digital Culture’.
Anthony MacIntyre, University College Dublin.
Zoom link:
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/96320605699?pwd=dDEzTFB3UlBxck5RQVlrM2JBcmROdz09
Meeting ID: 963 2060 5699
Password: 901354
This paper examines the convergence of political celebrity, emergent media formats, and unruly nationalism in the context of post-Brexit Britain and Ireland. The pranking of arch Brexiteer and right wing media pundit in Nigel Farage in 2021 by Irish customers of Cameo, a celebrity video message site, who tricked the politician into voicing a famously pro-IRA slogan: “up the ra,” provides a focal point for this examination of 2020’s political communication. While this wasn’t the first instance of “celebrity ventriloquism” on Cameo, it was certainly one of the most impactful given the contemporaneous tensions that Brexit had effected between Ireland and the UK over the uncertain status of Northern Ireland. As well as indexing transnational tensions with longstanding historical roots, the incident also signals a shift in democratic practice, constituting a flashpoint between emergent celebrity-influenced political populism, an unruly consumer-citizenry utilising affordances of web 2.0 technologies, and a diffuse gig economy that has spread into the realm of polity. Such convergences are a notable feature of post-Brexit digital culture, a phenomenon whose contours this paper seeks to delineate.
Anthony P. McIntyre is a Teaching Fellow in Film and Media Studies at University College Dublin. He is author of Transnationalism, Diaspora and Regionality in 21st Century Irish Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2022), co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (Routledge, 2017), and book reviews editor of Television and New Media.
***
Wednesday 30 March 2022, 4.00 – 5.30pm.
“We all have the power to help create the world we want”: The failed promise of diversity and meritocracy in the influencer industry.’
Zoe Glatt, LSE.
Zoom link:
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/92076369230?pwd=NXZBbklNUWx4RVZUOHFGeEcvQ2gyZz09
Meeting ID: 920 7636 9230
Password: 675883
In this talk, Zoë will explore some of the findings from her 5-year ethnographic study of the London and LA-based influencer industries (2017-2022). Contrary to highly celebratory discourses that position online content creation as more diverse, inclusive and meritocratic than traditional creative industries, she found that not only are certain content creators subject to long standing discriminations, but we can identify new forms of structural inequality emerging in particular ways as the result of the platformisation of creative labour. This is an advertising-driven industry that makes visible the most profitable creators, those who do not disrupt the neoliberal status quo: white, straight, male, middle class, cisgendered, brand-friendly. She argues that content creators who do not fit this narrow demographic face multiple obstacles to success spanning across the social, institutional and technological realms of their work.
Zoë Glatt is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, where she is conducting a multi-sited ethnography of the London and LA influencer industries (2017-2023). She is the Co-Founder of the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective and Graduate Student Representative for the Association of Internet Researchers (2019-2021). Zoë is regularly interviewed as a social media expert and has featured in Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Telegraph and Vice, amongst others. More info at: www.zoeglatt.com
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