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BCMCR Research Seminar – Creative industries – Publishing and
documentation
1600-1730 Wednesday
11 October 2017
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
Andy Conway (BCU) - PUNK PUBLISHING – How Self-Publishing
Indie Authors Took Over the Book World
A revolution in
publishing has happened. More writers today earn a living by self-publishing
than through traditional publishing.
‘Punk Publishing’, the new book by Andy Conway and David Wake, examines the new
digital landscape and presents a DIY guide for any writer planning to go indie.
With each lesson delivered in three simple ‘chords’, this explosive book
presents the most simple and direct way to become a publisher, with a DIY punk
ethic at its heart.
Paula Serafini (CAMEo, University of Leicester) - Document: making and marking time in artistic careers
How do artists reflect on their work and understand their own career trajectories and development? Document is a two-year project created by the East Midlands Contemporary Visual Arts Network, which works with six artists to provide a context for them to reflect on their working life, and engage in activity that documents their own personal and professional development. CAMEo Director Mark Banks has joined the advisory group of this project, and Paula Serafini is currently conducting research with the Document artists about their working practices, career paths, and experiences and understandings of time.
The session will
be followed by the launch of Riffs Issue
1 Volume 2
Riffs Issue 1 Vol. 2
Join us for the publication of Riffs Issue 1 Vol. 2, guest edited by Simon Barber, on Wednesday 11th October. Initially a tricky second album, we are excited to share with the staff and students of the Birmingham School of Media a range of experimental written, audio, and visual pieces of popular music research. Each responding to lyrics from Dan Wilson’s ‘A Song Can Be About Anything’, this volume of Riffs includes two photo essays, performance recordings, graphic scores, autoethnographic reflections, and a range of experimental analytical approaches, each considering lyrics, songwriting, and voice.
A song can be about anything
About peace or war, or the sins of industry
Or the discontents of fame, or of obscurity
Or how we first met, on the warmest day
And how I hadn't planned to love someone until you came
Or how we survived on happiness and sleeping on the floor
Or how you used to love me but you don't even know me anymore
- Dan Wilson, ‘A Song Can Be About Anything' from Love Without Fear
About the speakers:
Andy
Conway is a
screenwriter and historical fantasy author. He is a Lecturer in Creative
Writing, BCU School of English. David Wake is a writer of SF and steampunk
fiction and a graduate of the BCU MA in Creative Writing.
The Punk Publishers project emerged
from Andy and David’s attempt to write the definitive guide to independent
publishing.
Dr Paula Serafini is a Research Associate at CAMEo Research Institute, University of Leicester. Her research is in the field of cultural politics, and is particularly concerned with art activism and cultural resistance. In recent years she has conducted research on performance-based activism in the UK, and is currently working on cultural resistance to the extractive industries in Argentina. Paula is a co-editor of the forthcoming edited collection artWORK: Art, Labour and Activism (Rowman and Littlefield).
CAMEo is the Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies at the University of Leicester. CAMEo was launched in 2016 to provide new understandings of the cultural industries, the ‘creative economy’, arts, media and cultural policy, consumer culture dynamics, and the mediation and representation of cultural and economic life.
Riffs is a postgraduate journal of experimental writing on popular music (http://riffsjournal.org/).
BCMCR Research Seminar: Reading
the Whiteness of British Asian Literature
1600-1730
Wednesday 18 October 2017
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
Commodified
British Asian literary production is an example of the ways in which the
state/market has co-opted resistance while appearing inclusive, through
multicultural and diversity discourse. While packaged forms of ‘identity’ and
‘difference’ are used to sell these texts, the texts themselves reject
‘identity’ as socially constructed. The texts reflect the state’s
integrationist/ assimilationist policies, being founded on the assumption that
‘identity’ needs to be left behind (while a normalized invisible
whiteness/Britishness, as ‘non-identity’ should be embraced.) The inability of
academics, reviewers, readers, to ‘see’ the location of these texts in
whiteness as Britishness, reveals a liberal historicist racism - the texts
reflect and confirm their own assumptions. This is explored and argued through
a presentation of dominant readings of Sathnam Sanghera’s popular memoir The
Boy with Top-Knot, and a reading of the text itself.
About Kavita Bhanot:
Kavita Bhanot’s fiction, non-fiction, reviews have been published and broadcast
widely. She is editor of the anthology Too
Asian, Not Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press 2011), the forthcoming Book of
Birmingham (Comma Press, 2018) and co-editor of the first Bare Lit anthology
(Brain Mill Press, 2017). She has a PhD from Manchester University, is a reader
and mentor with The Literary Consultancy and is currently Honorary Creative
Writing Fellow at Leicester University.