Category Archives: General

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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Tony Palmer’s All You Need is Love

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Tony Palmer’s – All You Need is Love from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.

Invitation: Home, Identity and Citizenship – The Films of Philip Donnellan.

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You are invited to attend a screening of ‘Philip Donnellan’s The Colony’ (1964) followed by a discussion of an ongoing project to explore and promote the resources of the Philip Donnellan Archive.

6-8pm

Wednesday 30th June 2010

Birmingham Library Theatre

The Colony, originally made as an innovative TV documentary, explores the experience of members of the Caribbean migrant community in Birmingham and the Midlands. The film allows its subjects space to candidly evaluate their reception in the UK and their relationships with home and other migrant workers. Controversial at the time of its original broadcast the film is an enduring and powerful document of a key moment in post-war British history.
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