The study day below is open to all who wish to attend, and we particularly encourage those who are thinking about applying to our MA and PhD programmes. If you would like to attend, please contact Melanie Williams at the address below.

UEA Film, Television and Media Studies Postgraduate Study Day
‘Imagining a Community’: Media and National Identity
Thursday 20th February 2014, Thomas Paine Study Centre 1.5
Organisers: Llewella Burton, Carolyn Ellam, Mark Fryers, Sarah Hill, Melanie Williams

With a parachuting Queen, James Bond, Mr Bean and dancing NHS nurses, the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony masterminded by Danny Boyle presented an eclectic and often playful celebration of Britain and British-ness to a global audience. That same year, a troupe of Russian grandmothers dressed in folk costume took second place in the Eurovision Song Contest, standing out from their fellow competitors through their deliberate invocation of national tradition. As shown by these two recent examples, media representations of national identity are inevitably complicated by how, where and when they are situated, as well as the motivations of their creators and the responses they elicit from their (international) audiences.
The key question for this study day is: what is the place of national identity in a contemporary media landscape dominated by globalisation and transnationalism? If we consider the argument that our recognition and understanding of national identity is ‘both given and constantly reconstituted’ (Parekh, 2000), what role does the media perform in constructing, sustaining, or even destabilising, such concepts? Papers and presentations will explore the place of national ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983) across a global range of film, television and media texts and address the following questions:
-          How do we theorize the construction of national identity through media and culture and how has this changed in recent years?
-          How are national histories portrayed in the media?
-          How do national identities intersect with representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and class?
-          How do genres and formats vary according to national contexts?
-          What is the relationship between the national and the local or regional in media?
-          Exporting the national: how are media texts deriving from particular national contexts adapted, remade, marketed, distributed and exhibited for international audiences (and vice versa)? And how are they received by critics and audiences in both domestic and international settings?
-          How might the global flow of media employment and creative labour affect notions of national identity?
-          What is the role of media institutions, such as state broadcasters or the national press, in fostering a sense of national identity?
-          ‘National treasures’: what are the connections between celebrity culture and national identity?

For further information about attending the study day, please e-mail [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Professor Mark Jancovich
Associate Dean for Research, HUM
Film, Television and Media Studies
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
Tel: 01603 592787
blog: http://fantasticfilmtv.com/

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