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Dear All
I enclose details of the following event:
The Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck and
the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) invite you to:
Undercover: media exposure of institutional abuse, covert investigations and history
Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Saturday 16 April 2016, 14.30-17.30
During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the newspaper-reading public both sides of the Atlantic was gripped by two shocking exposés: in 1885, W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, set out to reveal the extent of child prostitution in the East End of London by attempting to infiltrate this dark underworld through ‘purchasing’ a 13-year-old girl; in New York, a young journalist named Nellie Bly feigned madness to get herself admitted to an asylum in order to expose horrifying cruelty towards patients. Almost a century later, ‘fly-on-the-wall’ filming techniques were used to reveal the traumatic questioning of a rape victim by the Thames Valley Police. And, in 2011, Panorama exposed abuse filmed with a hidden camera in the Winterbourne View Hospital for people with learning disabilities.
In this half-day workshop, cultural historians and media practitioners will explore how ideas of authority and ‘truth’ are embodied in both the person recording the abuse and the means or medium through which it is exposed. How do the personality, performance and skill of the reporter affect the degree to which revelations of abuse influence public opinion and government policy? How have specific methods and technologies facilitated covert reporting in the past? What might this tell us about future practices?
Speakers include:
Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck): the interviewing of a rape victim in Police, 1982
Helena Goodwyn (QMUL): W.T. Stead and the exposure of child prostitution in 1885
Joe Plomin (Panorama, BBC): Undercover exposés - Winterbourne View, 2011
Matthew Rubery (QMUL): Nellie Bly and Ten Days in a Mad-House, 1887
The presentations will be followed by a round-table discussion including Allan Young (McGill University) and chaired by Daniel Pick (Birkbeck)
Places are limited. If you would like to attend, please email [log in to unmask] telling us very briefly why the event is of interest to you.
Funded by the Birkbeck Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund and the Wellcome Trust.
For further details on the Birkbeck Trauma Project see:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/trauma/events/undercover-institutional-abuse-covert-investigations-and-history/http://www.bbk.ac.uk/trauma/events/undercover-institutional-abuse-covert-investigations-and-history/
best wishes
Emma Sandon