Category Archives: General

A micro history of Black Handsworth in the 1980s

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A micro history of Black Handsworth in the 1980s from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Wednesday afternoon research seminar presentation from our guest speaker Kieran Connell – a research student at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary History, University of Birmingham. Kieran is completing a micro history of Black Handsworth in the 1980s.

Kieran’s paper on recent cultural history was well programmed as our regular Book Group discussion that followed his presentation used Exhibiting Popular Music: Museum Audiences, Inclusion and Social History by Marion Leonard (University of Liverpool) and Museums and Popular Culture by Kevin Moore as the starting point for a wider discussion about the cultural heritage work that some  members of the centre are involved in.

Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul

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Professor Tim Wall is speaking at this Symposium hosted by The University of Salford next month.

Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul
Robert Powell Theatre, 4 November, 2010; 1-5 P.M.

A spirited examination of dance culture, record collecting, and the perpetual British love for American Rhythm & Blues

Programme

1:00 Tim Wall, Birmingham City University

“Northern Soul: There’s Nothing Northern About It (And While We’re At It, It Isn’t Soul and the Dancers Aren’t Break Dancers”)

1:30 Nicola Smith, University of Wales Institute Cardiff

“Dancing Alone, Together: Pleasure, Competency and Competition On The Northern Soul Dancefloor”

2:00 Screening “The Wigan Casino” (Tony Palmer, 1977)
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Music, Heritage and Cities at Un-Convention

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Members of the Interactive Cultures research group attended/took part in a panel at the recent Un-Convention event in Salford writes Paul Long.

Jez Collins, the originator of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive chaired a panel consisting of: Dr Marion Leonard, who was the curator of Liverpool’s The Beat Goes On, and who oversees on ongoing project to examine how museums collect and preserve (or not) popular music; Alison Surtees of the Manchester District Music Archive; Eve Wood, the director of the documentary Made in Sheffield (2001) and Mike Darby of Bristol Archive Records.

Speakers offered insights into each of their projects, revealing the variety of practices in this field, the public appetite for music heritage and the innovations and connections that curation has been making. Surtees for instance outlined how the online MDMA had generated input from around 2000 individuals, half of which regularly posted material on the site. Some of these were members of the bands featured and indeed, these explorations of music past also connected with the present scene in ways that avoided the potential necrophilia of such work.

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Call for Papers – Home of Metal

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Home of Metal: Heavy Metal and Place
Capsule and the University of Wolverhampton

Location: University of Wolverhampton

Date: 1st – 4th September 2011

Key note speakers:
Prof. Scott Wilson, Kingston University (TBC)
Prof. Deena Weinstein, DePaul University (TBC)

The Heavy Metal movement is littered with accounts of its birth, not
only concerning the origins of the sound, but also the geographical and
political locations from which the music evolved. The now global
phenomenon of Heavy Metal culture has seen much change in the sounds,
styles and fashions over its 40 years of history, but is simultaneously
acutely aware of its origins in Birmingham and The Black Country (UK).

This conference on Metal and place aims to explore and evaluate the
important role that location, heritage and place have in the origins of
Heavy Metal and music in general. It will serve to engage in debate
concerning values, histories and myths in the foundation of this
movement and looking at the wider role of archiving music histories and
current practice surrounding this.

Home of Metal aims to celebrate the musical heritage of Birmingham and
The Black Country. This conference forms part of the “Home of Metal”
exhibitions and festival taking place across Birmingham and The Black
Country in the UK throughout 2011.

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New Centre Blogs

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Two new blogs to bring to your attention.

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.

Birmingham Zine Festival

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Discussions of fanzines are often in the margins of media and cultural studies literature but they do appear. A recent example is Chris Atton’s article Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetic and the “Democratic Conversation” in Popular Music and Society (33.4, 517-531, 2010).

I was asked to talk about music fanzines at the Birmingham Zine Festival. This informal presentation relates my experiences of music fanzines around the end of the 1980s.

The Ins and Outs of Music Fanzines by Interactive Cultures

Call for Papers – UB40 Symposium.

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Venue: Birmingham City University, UK.

Friday 18th March 2011.

Organizers: Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research in association with Birmingham Popular Music Archive.

This year, the Birmingham-based band UB40 celebrates the 30th anniversary of the release of the album ‘Signing Off’.
The band gained its name from an unemployment benefit form and achieved fame and notoriety in the ‘post-punk’ era. Known for a dedication to popularizing the sounds of reggae music the band has maintained a commitment to political issues through its music as well as cultural and social action.

Over 30 years the band has sold over 100 million albums and continues to tour extensively around the world. While the band’s star has waxed and waned in critical favour at home in the UK, it maintains a global fan base, which is particularly strong in the Third World.

This symposium seeks to bring together researchers with an interest in the band in order to consider its place in various scholarly contexts.
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Digital Academic Publishing event report

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Representatives of Sage, Palgrave, Berg, Humanities eBooks, Intellect, Adam Matthew Digital, JURN and several University publishing houses joined academics from the Birmingham Centre for Media and Culture Research on Monday 6th September at a conference to discuss the field of Digital Academic Publishing.

The Keynote speech by Masoud Yazdani of Intellect Books is available on the audio player below.

Masoud Yazdani- Digital Academic Publishing by Interactive Cultures

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Digital Academic Publishing – researching the field

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Editors and publishers conference

Monday 6th September 2010

Digital development and Application; Content and Creativity

The publishing industry is currently undergoing major challenges: digitisation: is changing the material form of the industry’s key artefacts; the internet is transforming the potential ways in which publications can be distributed and the expectations of their consumers; and these two lead to profound implications for the business models of companies in the industry. Through this event we hope to bring together individuals and organisations involved in academic publishing to identify the issues and set out a way forward. We will present research we have undertaken into the perceptions of publishers, and identity models for the future which have been developed in both publication and our own work with the music business.

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On, Archives! conference report

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Professor Tim Wall & Dr Paul Long, recently presented a paper at a ‘On, Archives!’, a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA from July 6-9.
This is Paul’s report.

On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).

En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.

Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.

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