Our first faculty Social Café was kick started by Interactive Culture’s Dr Paul Long, School of Media, who spoke about his interest in the MACE archive and discussed the possibilities and issues in working with and establishing archives within the faculty. This acted as a catalyst for debate and conversation amongst colleagues and was a great success.
Dr Long described his interest in archiving as an important resource for institutions and scholars whether they are focused on pure research or practice led research through knowledge transfer projects. He raised questions about the challenges of dealing with archives such as their accessibility for students and the wider community. He expressed optimism regarding the opportunities facing us as a new faculty and challenged us to debate the potential of working with archives.
For those of you who could not make it, the Social Café has been established in order to enable all PME faculty staff to meet with colleagues on a regular and informal basis. This is intended as a social, enabling and mutually supportive environment, open to all staff interested in research and related activities – at whatever stage of development.
The café environment allows us to formulate and correspond on novel ideas and project, explore PME policy and direction, ‘pure’ research, knowledge transfer, research by practice, public events, and so on – without limit.
The cafe convenes every 3-4 weeks, between 5.30-6.30pm at the Birmingham Conservatoire Bar. Each session will have a lead theme and a speaker who will talk for about 15 minutes and act as a catalyst for a discussion in small groups. Of course, discussion and interests are not confined to any one theme.
The success of this venture and the impact we will have upon PME direction in research will be the responsibility of us all collectively so please do get in touch if you want more information or would like to present.
The next Social Café will be Wednesday 11th February. Please RSVP to confirm your attendance or if you have any queries or suggestions for future themes please contact Paul Long or Annette Naudin. Please note at this point, membership of the Social Café is reserved for colleagues from the Faculty of Performance Media & English. However, we’d welcome the opportunity to meet with academics and industry contacts in a similar forum so please do get in touch.
I had some really interesting conversations at the event. In particular, colleagues in English told us about an archive of letters they hold. These letters document the editorial process between authors and publishers in the early 20th century.
We discussed how this might inform a study into the early editorial and publishing practices of the mass media, which we might expect to have been informed by the processes of publishing.
While this wasn’t of direct relevance to my own current teaching and research interests, I can see a scenario in which the availability of this archive material might be of use to other colleagues or students. The Café is important to help develop these sort of ideas.
Sounds like a good event. I’m unsure if this blog is about communicating to the outside world or is used for internal communications. Whichever, you’re in danger of making the rest of us feel like we’re on the same train as Woody Allen at the beginning of Stardust Memories.
Widen the events – have a dialogue with the city on these things. Position yourself as the place to talk about this stuff.
In response to your comment Dave – at the moment this is an internal group for us to figure out what research goes on in PME. We are a new faculty – just trying to get to know each other and working out common ground. In time, we may well invite others and use this as a means to communicating and discussing ideas with the wider community.
To add to what Annette has said, but focusing now on the “voice” of this blog: yes this is an externally focused blog.
We are only publishing things on here that have some relevance in terms of explaining the scope of our activity, or communicating with partners current and potential.
Most readers of this post will only have a passing interest in it, and it is aimed more narrowly than other things we publish: at colleagues within our Faculty. While the Faculty is of course internal to BCU, university structures make it is easier to think of Faculty as an external partner, worthy of being communicated with at the same level as groups within the city and beyond.
This event has no other web presence due to it’s very small scale and remit, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of being reported and we’re pleased to host information about the event.
The idea behind this post, and future posts on this event and in this category are therefore two fold:
1) To add to the overall picture of what we do (for when the AHRC, RAE et al take a look)
2) To provide a space for discussion with faculty colleagues after this event (assuming they wish to continue the discussion).
Hope that helps you understand us better!
Thanks for the clarification. More than happy to hear about it. Sounds good but do open up at some point. In the sector I work in the City still thinks TIC are the only game in BCU worth knowing….
Hopefully the caff (as I shall call it) will lead to some projects, partnerships, and outcomes that are a bit more outwardly engaged. But in its self it will no doubt continue in this manner until it has fulfilled its purpose.
It’s more of an incubator than a finished product.