2015 Doctoral Student-led Conference | Abstracts

FMACS in association with BIRMAC (Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture)

FMACS Doctoral Student-led Conference

Thursday 4 June, 2015

ABSTRACTS

Hannah BARTON, Finding the Words: the Rare Meme Problem

This presentation will describe some of the challenges involved in interpreting the idiosyncratic vernacular of Internet memes, along with the ways I have gone about perspectivizing memes as subject matter.

Jacopo BOROLUSSI, Influence of Underground Music in Angura’s Aesthetics and Thinking

My PhD research focuses on the Angura (underground) counter-cultre music in post-war Japan. The political implications of this music have so far been largely overlooked by the relative academic research, and my objective is to study the relation of this music to its broader artistic and socio-political context. My presentation will refer to my recent art-work findings and how this will be used in my PhD research into underground music in post-war Japan.

Jo COLEMAN: Talk of the Town: Defining the Boundaries

I’ve spent my first year finding out how local, community radio is being defined and dealt with in the field of media and communications studies.  Over the last year I have found myself incorporating a phenomenological approach and am drawn to the human geography perspective.  At the recent Space and Place inter-disciplinary colloquium hosted by the University of Sheffield, I argued that radio listening is a spatial practice. It is tactically applied in our appropriation of the world around us.

And I have reached a theoretical position where I view on-line radio stations as effectively ‘meaningful places’ in their own right, our experiences of which help to inform our sense of identity in society.

Piero CORCILLO, Post Olympic Games Athletes’ Villages Redevelopment: A Comparison of Turin 2006 and London 2012

This research draws attention to the Olympic Villages post-event reconversion. My thesis is a comparative analysis between Turin and London, which hosted the 2006 Winter Games and the 2012 Summer Olympics respectively. It is based on documents, participant observation and interviews for investigating: what the Athletes’ Villages redevelopments in London and Turin reveal in terms of desire for city-branding and of urban transformation that results in the creation and implementation of cultural and urban policy: to what extent have the public-private partnerships which have run the London and Turin Athletes’ Villages redevelopments addressed their local communities’ housing needs; and what the nature of the Post-Olympics redevelopments in each city reveals about the role of mega-events in relation to processes of neoliberal urban regeneration.

Adam COX, Paradigmatic Shifts in Financial Regulation:  The Media’s Role in Building Agendas

My research will investigate how media may help to build agendas for financial regulation policy. The relationship between the media, the regulatory community and the financial industry is a relatively unexplored subject, one that has taken on greater significance in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. I hope to build on a large body of theoretical literature concerning the media’s scope for setting and building agendas and what that means for society.

Richard EVANS, Learning Problems and Solving Lessons: an open-handed posture to PhD projects

My presentation outlines some of the challenges I have addressed in the past year in the course of my research. After describing these, I outline how each of these was handled and how these have shaped the project and my approach.

Tom HENDRY, The Role of Acting in Film as Performance

My recent research into adaptation has led me to look into the scholarship surrounding the history and trends of film as performance. It has long been accepted that cinema audiences experience performances that have been created and modified by the work of directors, screenwriters, editors, cinematographers, make-up artists, music composers and sound editors.

However, I have found a lot of evidence to support a view that the study and appreciation of acting in film has long been neglected.

Muriel HUANG, Differences and Discrimination in the Cultural Policy: An Analysis of Cultural Representation and Intercultural Cohesion in Taiwan

This research has found the three major reasons caused institutional discrimination through cross-sectoral policy system in Taiwan. In order to find out the problem, I will focus on the ethnic-minority group of the Indigenous People. This research will first approach three particular stereotypical forms that can be found in contemporary Taiwanese society: 1) the historical-based; 2) the political-based; and 3) the class-based. It will then concluded by the following three points, firstly, the way of the dominant culture classifying different cultural and ethnic groups; second, the classification of group is about how the dominance group making policies, the cultural hierarchy has represented in the cultural policy of the nation; and the last, the institutional discrimination also created stereotypes between cultural groups.

Meng-Yu LAI, The new National Performing Arts Centre: Reshaping the Cultural Environment and Enhancing the National Identity of Taiwan.

So far I have done research and written an easy on the status of the ‘country’, Taiwan, and its cultures, and looks at the way the historical background influences the cultural policy framework and also cultural environment in Taiwan.

Anselm McLEOD, The British Raj through the Viewfinder: A Critical Discussion of Pre-Independence British and South Asian Produced Colonial Newsreels.

My research investigates newsreels produced in and about the British Raj, primarily by British and South Asian concerns, during the late colonial period; from their emergence in the early twentieth century to independence from colonial rule and the partitioning of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947. Situating newsreels within the wider context of emergent mass media practices, in particular non-theatrical film, I am currently examining the roles that production, distribution and exhibition practices and external factors such as legislation played in informing and shaping the form and content – including propaganda value – of newsreels.

Alison PAYNE, From Filmlets to Commercial

How the film industry in Britain reconfigured itself, in a uniquely British way, to produce TV commercials in the first few years of commercial TV.  Including fascinating new research on how ad agencies made themselves central to the process—the fluid movement of documentary and feature film personnel into TV ads—Sandy Mackendrick, Joseph Losey, Jack Cardiff—the surprising number of women who became directors of TV ads

Sarah SCARSBROOK and Ruth SOLOMONS, Attempting to Describe the Artist Identity: How We co-ordinated Disparate Voices in the Fields of Education, Work and Authorship of Artists

We propose a 15-20 minute collaborative presentation that takes the form of a Q&A/appraisal, drawing on our recent collaboration with final year PhD candidate Niki Zanti on the jointly coordinated Artist Identity symposium that took place as part of Birkbeck Arts Week on Tuesday 19 May 2015