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BCMCR Research Seminar –Creative Industries - Beatfreeks, Big Data and me: reflections so far
1600-1730
Wednesday 7 November 2018
C284, Curzon B, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this
link
Jill Robinson (BCU) Beatfreeks, Big Data and me: reflections so far
In this talk I begin with a consideration of some of the challenges presented by the broad scope of my research topic: the contribution of Big Data and Data Visualization to young people’s social and cultural inequalities. I go on to reflect on undertaking a collaborative PhD with my creative industries partner, Beatfreeks Collective. Finally, I propose to share some of the themes which have emerged from the first few months of our working together and their implications for my research going forward.
About Jill Robinson:
Jill Robinson MA (Oxon), FRSA
I spent the first part of my working life as a teacher of History and Government and Politics, a singer, a radio interviewer/researcher and arts administrator. I then worked for Birmingham City Council for twenty years working mainly on European funding, policy analysis and development and transnational networks and projects. I also spent time as an adviser on EU & Lottery Arts funding and cultural strategy. Since retiring, I have worked as a freelance consultant on social affairs and cultural and creative industries. In 2012 I was invited to become a Visiting Fellow at Aston University where I co-authored (and subsequently managed) a successful bid for a 3 year transnational EU FP7 funded project CITISPYCE investigating young people’s innovative practices to combat their inequalities. I am a Trustee of Ex Cathedra and also of the Philip Bates Trust and am currently an M3C Doctoral student at BCU.
BCMCR Research Seminar – Creative
Industries – Work in Progress
1600-1730 Wednesday 14 November 2018
C284, Curzon B, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
Alexa Torlo (BCU) STEAMlab – a
open innovation model to foster creative solutions
Focus on one case study ‘STEAMlab
Health - Future of Respiratory Care’ how areas of change are required to meet a
challenge to foster creative solutions. It will draw on how the STEAMlab
connects communities and how we are linking our approach to other areas of the
city for example The Pump in Shard End with a specific challenge around “how to
cultivate young people’s creativity and support entrepreneurship utilising our
Makerspace as a model for sustainability”
Prof Rajinder Dudrah (BCU) Slanguages:
Research/Practice/Collaboration
Slanguages is a consortia project
involving different universities and cultural stakeholders and is exploring the
creative way artists take inspiration from and use different languages. The
project is wide-ranging and includes exhibitions, performances, and
collaborations with artists, creative professionals and partners such as Punch
Records, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre,
Beatfreaks, and Sputnik Theatre Company, London. This presentation will discuss
the project thus far, particularly around the borderland spaces between
research, practice and collaboration and consider some of the implications of
this.
Prof. Paul Long (BCU) smART
Audiences? Understanding on and offline engagement in the smARTplaces project
This paper considers the
challenges for audience development emerging from the Creative Europe-funded
smARTplaces project. Echoing the challenges of the European Union’s cultural
policies and address, smARTplaces call to its potential audience is inflected
on one hand by the identity of individuals within the bounds of nation state,
local conditions and concerns as well as prompts to engage with culture. On the
other hand, there is the push and pull of European culture and identity.
Furthermore, the online presence of smARTplaces gives it the global reach of
digital projects raising questions about the potential audience beyond
EU borders. Locating smARTplaces in the context of EU-funded and other projects
of this nature poses questions for this presentation about our perception of
audience engagement, durability and indeed authenticity. How do digital
mediations offer ways of understanding who hears the call to participate in
culture, the extent to which they follow up this call with attendance as well
as the degree to which they are able to enter into a relationship with cultural
institutions?
Dr. Karen Patel (BCU) Supporting
diversity in craft practice
In this presentation I will reflect on my AHRC funded Creative Economy
Engagement Fund project in collaboration with Crafts Council UK. The project
seeks to support diversity in craft practice through social media skills
development, focusing particularly on women makers of colour. Now I am near the
end of the project I will provide an overview of the activities carried out so
far, potential next steps and some of the intellectual questions raised by the
project.
About the speakers:
Alexa Torlo: My role specialises in open innovation practice and involves producing a variety of development labs aimed at bringing people together from different disciplines, to test, learn and prototype. Working on programmes that help creatives achieve their ambitions to bring new ideas to the market place and develop links internationally. I have worked on a variety of EU funded initiatives to support the creative industries, including Cross Innovation Interreg IVC project, sharing city policies and experiences, Design for Europe looking at design methodologies to help organisations innovate & grow and ECCE Innovation focussing on the internationalisation of SMEs.
Rajinder Dudrah is Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries in the School of Media, Birmingham City University.
Paul Long is Professor of Media and Cultural History in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University. His recent research on popular music history, heritage and archives has taken a practical turn with the co-curation of the exhibition 'Is There Anyone Out There?' Documenting Birmingham's Alternative Music Scene 1986-1990 (Parkside, 2016) and in his involvement in the Home of Metal heritage events and exhibitions for 2019. He is currently writing Memorialising Popular Music Culture: History, Heritage and the Archive (Rowman and Littlefield) for publication in 2020.
Dr Karen Patel is an AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). Her research interests centre on questions of expertise and inequalities in cultural labour, and the role of social media in creative practice. Her current research focuses on the expertise of women craft makers from ethnic minority backgrounds.
BCMCR Research Seminar – Creative
Industries: Hope on the margins
1600-1730 Wednesday 21 November 2018
C284, Curzon B, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
Dr. Jonathan Gross (Kings College London) Practices of Hope? Care, Creativity and the Possibilities of Cultural Policy
Depending on your feelings towards Brexit, right-wing populism, and climate science, it may seem that hope is currently in short supply. But hope and optimism are not the same thing (Eagleton 2015). Optimism may be a more-or-less arbitrarily assumed view that things will go well, potentially involving a complacent complicity with the injustices of the present. Hope, by contrast, is the deep sense that our actions matter, even when we can’t be sure when or how they will make a difference (Solnit 2016). This paper, building on the work of Oliver Bennett (2015), argues for the importance of understanding the conditions that enable and constrain hope, and the implications this may have for cultural policy. It draws on the capabilities approach (Sen 1999; Nusbaum 2011), showing that this particular framework for social justice can help clarify hope, and why it matters. The second half of the paper brings together these theoretical insights with analysis of fieldwork conducted in one outer London borough, and the versions of hope (and its absence) within the lives of young people there. The paper concludes by suggesting that understanding hope, and its conditions, is not a peripheral concern. It is an urgent political question, hiding in plain sight.
Dr. Maria Barrett (University of Warwick) Borders and Hinterlands: The Case of Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre
Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre straddles multiple borders: sociological, cultural, spatial, and political. Some of these it successfully exploits, using strategies of subversion within its field of Liverpool theatre, and using its outsider status as a way of engaging and embracing an outsider audience. Other borders it has perhaps the victim of, existing on the edges of the valorisation (and fiscal security) bestowed by major revenue funding. Meanwhile, the Royal Court’s working-class audience members have successfully overcome the barrier of attending a valorised cultural venue and, through exploiting its liminal spaces, made it into a shared, convivial place in which they can find a sense of belonging analogous to other, more socially congruent fields. This presentation will examine the Royal Court Liverpool’s borders and hinterlands, and ask how it has managed to subvert, negotiate, and exploit living on the edge, and also ask whether its success in negotiating those borders and leaving its hinterlands will perhaps threaten its future.
About the speakers:
Dr. Jonathan Gross is a Teaching Fellow and Researcher in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London.
Dr. Maria Barrett is an academic and researcher in the fields of cultural sociology, cultural policy, and audience studies. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, where she teaches Cultural Policy and Arts Management. Maria is currently part of the consortium evaluating the National Theatre’s Theatre Nation Partnerships, a strategic touring project to develop new audiences for drama in target areas across England. She is contracted to Palgrave Macmillan for a monograph on class and theatregoing, looking at working class audiences at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool. Before coming to academia, Maria was an arts practitioner, entrepreneur and manager in the performing arts, and she has also been a theatre director and performer.
Please see the Eventbrite link for Maria’s full bio.