First up is The Treehouse. The Treehouse is the name we’ve given to the shared office of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research on the 4th Floor of Baker Building at Birmingham City University.
This website reflects the casual, fun, collegiate and collaborative aspects of the working environment.
I’d also like to introduce you to Popular Music History – So What? which is my posterous blog and serves as a PhD research scrapbook.
It features some of the interviews I conducted around the end of 2008 with academics, curators, authors and media producers which were intended for a radio documentary about the political economy of popular music history activity. This endeavour (which I pursed outside my day job) was promoted by my involvement as a volunteer with Home of Metal. This was a little while before the centre’s first studentship had been announced. Working through these ideas meant that when the position was advertised I was in a great place to write a proposal.
We’ve just announced a Research Studentship worth £16,680 per year. Working closely with Prof. Tim Wall & Andrew Dubber (newly conferred as a Reader), the research student will be part of the Interactive Cultures team and work on projects that continue our work in popular music, radio and how they are changing in a digital age.
Here’s the ad:
The Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research is a rapidly developing centre of research excellence based at Birmingham City University with a community of over thirty academics and research degree students. Centre staff conduct research into all aspects of the media and popular culture, but have a particularly strong reputation in work about the changing form of popular music and radio media.
The research would form part of the work of the Interactive Cultures group, and you would be supervised by Prof Tim Wall Dr Paul Long and Andrew Dubber. Their work in popular music, radio and cultural politics is internationally recognised with both academic and media communities, and you would have the opportunity to be involved in a number of major research and knowledge transfer initiatives including the Music and Radio Innovation and the Music Consumption in the Digital Age projects.
We are offering a three-year, full-time research studentship, linked to our doctoral programme.
The studentship is open to both home and overseas students, although you would be responsible for any fee or living expenses beyond the value of the studentship.
Applications can be made to undertake research degree work in a study relevant to one of the following themes:
The music industry in the digital age
Music culture in the digital age
Radio in the digital age
Applications from any academic background are welcome, but the successful candidate must be able to demonstrate familiarity with the music or radio industries, and the implications of new technologies. We will select the successful candidate primarily upon the quality of their research proposal.
Normally we would look for applicants with a masters degree which included research training, but we welcome non-traditional applications from those with strong industrial backgrounds and experience in research and written communication.
A willingness and ability to contribute to our research community is particularly desirable.
The studentship period will start in March 2010 or as soon as possible thereafter. The studentships will attract a bursary of £13,290 per annum in addition to a waiver of the tuition fees up to the home student rate of £3,390. Successful candidates will usually be expected to participate in the wider activities of the research centre, and there may be opportunities for an additional paid research assistant or teaching role for up to 180 hours per year.
How to apply
Complete and submit the ‘Application for Research Degree Course’ form which should include a research degree proposal of no more than 600 words. We may ask you to supply more information if you are selected for interview. Please indicate that you are applying for the research studentship in popular music and radio in the digital age, or we may inadvertently treat your application as one simply for our research degree programme.
The final closing date is Monday 1st March 2010 but we will select appropriate candidates for interview as applications arrive.
You should return the completed application form to:
Dr John Mercer
Research Degree Coordinator, Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University, Perry Barr, Birmingham B42 2SU
I was recently invited by the United Nations and World Health Organisation to attend their annual international conference to discuss the use of radio in prisons as a way to engage with hard to reach prisoners. I, Morag McDonald (from CRQ at BCU), Phil Maguire (from the Prison Radio Association-one of our KTF partners) and Andrew Wilkie (from the National Prison Radio Authority) presented a one hour workshop on the benefits of using prison radio as a tool for health promotion and education within prisons. Continue reading →
Andrew Dubber and I spent the end of July at The Radio Conference. This is a bi-annual international gathering of radio studies academics which this year took place at York University in Toronto Canada. The conference brought together people studying radio from across the world, and there were particularly strong contingents from Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and USA, as you’d expect from an English language conference; but most parts of the world had at least one scholar representing them.
In an earlier post we mentioned an Interactive Cultures radio documentary about Irish rocker Phil Lynott. To mark what would have been Lynott’s 60th birthday this Thursday, BBC West Midlands 95.6 FM will be broadcasting the half hour feature at approximately 1300 on the Jimmy Franks Show on Saturday the 22nd of August.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/local_radio/
The feature will also be discussed on the Thursday morning breakfast show with possible contributions from narrator Paul Murphy and Dawn Mccarrick, the UK Representative of the Phil Lynott Memorial Trust. As fate would have it, it turns out Dawn works here at BCU. Small world.
The national rock station ‘Absolute Radio’ (ex Virgin) will feature sections from the interviews along with the rare Lynott track showcased in the documentary. This can be heard during ‘Geoff Lloyd’s Hometime Show’ on Thursday afternoon, August 20th at http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk. Freeview (channel 727).
‘Spin FM 1038′ in Dublin will also be featuring music from the documentary – which has been designed to indirectly promote the efforts of Jez Collins at the Birmingham Music Archive, the initiator of this project. The radio feature was created as a “prototype” method of disseminating information about the BMA, as part of an ongoing KTF partnership with BCU.
The team here were relieved to hear that Phil’s Mother, Philomena Lynott in Dublin, had seen the YouTube clips accompanying this documentary and sent her approval.
The audio slideshow attached to this posting features extracts taken from the documentary of Paul Murphy’s journey from Birmingham to Dublin. Other YouTube clips discuss the poetry of Phil Lynott:
http://www.vimeo.com/5887808
And a previously unheard song, featuring Lynott, that had been sitting under a bed gathering dust for 25 years:
http://www.vimeo.com/5851012
In an earlier post we mentioned an Interactive Cultures radio documentary about Irish rocker Phil Lynott. To mark what would have been Lynott’s 60th birthday this Thursday, BBC West Midlands 95.6 FM will be broadcasting the half hour feature at approximately 1300 on the Jimmy Franks Show on Saturday the 22nd of August.
Last week I served time at HMP Brixton, as part of our commitment to KTF partners the Prison Radio Association. It was a productive session, which taught spot production skills and built on previous visits to Swinfen Hall, a long term male prison for young adults just outside Lichfield, and Brockhill, a male prison serving the Worcestershire and West Midlands areas.
Last week I attended the University of Nottingham’s “Internet Attractions” workshop, sponsored by the AHRC as part of their “Beyond Text” research programme. Over two days the team examined short-form online media and the fleeting ways they tend to circulate. This was the first of two workshops in the series and focused on ‘user-generated’ content.
The workshop brought together academics from a range of disciplines as well as various media practitioners. Keynote speakers included Professor Barbara Klinger from Indiana University and Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director of “Strange Company”.
There are currently 195 licensed community radio stations in the U.K. – with more on the way. At this rate, it won’t be long before community stations outnumber their commercial cousins. But although community radio’s thriving across the country, it’s been noticeably underrepresented in London, where frequencies have been scarce. It would seem that’s about to change, as Ofcom is currently seeking applications for community radio licences within Greater London and the M25.
With this in mind, earlier in the month Siobhan Mullen and I joined the first of three “Pathways For Community Media in London” seminars organised by London Metropolitan University. The aim of the series is to “bring together community media practitioners to identify the needs and aspirations of London’s many disenfranchised communities and discuss a way forward that will give them a voice over the airwaves and the internet”. The hope is to eventually produce a manifesto for Community Media in London.
I was recently invited to make a contribution to the Mobile Music Symposium taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the US. I offered the organisers a paper on the transistor radio and its role in the developments of US radio music listening in the 1950s and 60s.
In fact I should have been there today, but sadly at the last minute I wasn’t able to make the journey. In true Interactive Cultures style, though, I offered a videoed version of my paper, and a Skype link so I could join in the question and answer session. You can watch the whole paper presentation (it’s just over 16 minutes long) thanks to Vimeo. Continue reading →
