These are my links for 15 June to 30 June:
Links to the presentations from the ‘Our History in Our Hands’ workshop.
Presentation by Helen Hockx-Yu, British Library
More information about some of the tools he described is available on his blog.
Thank you once again to our fantastic speakers!
Please click here to give us your feedback on the event. And let us know where we should go from here….
Image by Frankie Roberto on Flickr.
Title: Journal of Media Practice Symposium
Location: University of Sussex
Description: This year the symposium will focus on the theme of ‘Mediated Memories’ and will include a strand on the uses and construction of memory in contemporary media practice. Topics for consideration include:
* the use and creation of archives
* oral histories
* family memories
* cultural memory and narrative
* cultural memory and documentary practice
* forgetfulness in the age of information
* dementia
* home movies past and present
* the uses of nostalgia
* reminiscence
* computer memory
* memory and identity
* amnesia and the unconscious
Start Time: 09:00
Date: 2009-07-13
End Time: 17:00
From EASA media anthropology network:
Natalia Rulyova and Jeremy Morris, The University of Birmingham, in cooperation with Vlad Strukov, the University of Leeds, and Seth Graham, SSEES, University College London, are organising a series of two workshops New Media in New Europe-Asia. We are applying for CEELBAS support to run the workshops and are planning to have the best papers published in a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies. We invite contributions from scholars working in a range of disciplines and taking disciplinary, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to new media in Russia, Eurasia and Central Europe. We have outlined the themes of the workshops below.
SSEES, UCL, 28 May 2010
The Nature and Culture of New Media
Contact Natalia Rulyova, n.e.rulyova@bham.ac.uk for more information.
Title: Film screening by GPI generation
Location: George Padmore Institute, 76 Stroud Green Road, London N4 3EN, UK
Description: The True Reggae Story
GPI Generation is a new group at the GPI encouraging participation from young people in the activities of the Institute. In 2007 GPI Generation showed the film Dream to Change the World to a group of young people and held a discussion about their responses to John La Rose\’s legacy and their own lives and work. Since then they have held a number of discussion meetings and accomplished a video of Irma La Rose speaking of her early life in Trinidad and Venezuela.
Today the group are screening The True Reggae Story a Nu-Beyond summer school project that involved six young women and four young men aged between 15 and 17. In 2006, these young people interviewed 32 artist/dee jays for a study of Reggae Dancehall Culture during the 1970s and 1980s in London. Most of the interviewees were artists who had operated Reggae Sound Systems during those two decades.
The film will be followed by a discussion with participation from Lez Henry, the director of the project, some of the young people who took part in the making of the film, and members of GPI Generation, many of whom are involved in the music business.
Event on GPI website.
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-06-24
End Time: 21:00
These are my links for 12 June from 15:20 to 15:41:
Yesterday, I presented a poster about our work at the annual conference of the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Migration (CRONEM) at the University of Surrey. The abstract for the poster is available here and the final version can be downloaded here. (Condensing it to A4 size did some funny things to the layout - sorry…).
The aim of our poster was to stimulate a discussion about future research challenges relating to the role of online ‘archives’ in constructing identities in diasporic communities. No one has as yet given us any pointers as to how we might design an appropriate research methodology, but there was a broad consensus that these are important future questions.
An additional reason for attending was to catch up on the latest debates about how societies ‘manage’ diversity. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the ‘backlash’ against multiculturalism, a phenomenon which has filtered through to the heritage sector (for example through the side-lining of the Heritage Diversity Task Force at the GLA). Ien Ang, the opening keynote speaker set the tone by taking on this issue right from the start. She argued that the policy shift needs to be situated not just in the context of 9/11 and its aftermath, but also within the wider framework of neo-liberal globalisation, which has fuelled transnational flows whilst at the same time raising anxieties about diversity in many populations undergoing rapid change. She highlighted the need for social conditions to facilitate conversation and exchange between ‘different’ people, in order to contribute to the ‘normalisation’ of cultural diversity. But she also did not suggest that inter-cultural dialogue was any sort of panacaea: as she put it, “there is no definitive way of resolving the multicultural question,” only “ways of juggling multiple identities.”
This weary (although not necessarily pessimistic) realism seemed to me to characterise many of the arguments I heard, and this seems to me to be a shift from the tone of the discourse of few years back, when ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘inter-cultural dialogue’ were being touted as possible paths towards harmonious liberal democracies. Perhaps liberal democracies have also lost some of their sheen; certainly, the erasure of conflict around aspects of identity no longer seems either achievable or, to some, entirely desirable. Amanda Wise for example posed the very pertinent question, drawing on her research into interactions between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in Australia, of just what the best possible outcome looks like? Should we be worried if friendships across cultural divides remain rare, as long as people can find ways to ‘rub along together’ in the workplace, or civic spaces?
The theoretical thread was pursued by Floya Anthias, who offered a ‘thought piece’, rather than research findings. She made a number of useful points, including on the theme of ‘identity’, which she sees as an unhelpful category (as do many others). Instead, she argued, we should consider ‘claims’ people make on ‘representational or distributive resources’ (on the basis of a strategic identity) and the ‘attributions’ that are imposed on members of particular groups. Overall, the emphasis should not be on ‘difference’ per se, but the way ‘identities’ are mobilised to construct boundaries.
One of the most troubling sessions I attended was about citizenship, and specifically the introductin of citizenship ceremonies and education in the UK. Eleni Andreouli, Bridget Byrne and Charlotte Chadderton all seemed to confirm that in both registry offices and the classroom, an implicitly racialised, exclusive notion of ‘Britishness’ is being pushed by registrars and teachers, who have received minimal (if any) training in order to enable them to fulfil their new roles. This is partly because government guidelines have produced a Britishness that is negatively construed; in other words, it is a concept that is presented as having become necessary because our national ‘community’ is experiencing unprecedented threats (from terrorists, benefit cheats, illegal migrants etc.). There is nothing in this formulation to suggest everything that immigrants have contributed to Britain, or indeed that we are all, on some level, immigrants or descendants of immigrants.
The thing that concerned me most however in this respect is the extent to which there is a huge gap between academia and policy; very little of this critique seems to me to feed through to the government agencies in question. This discrepancy is most marked in the area of border controls. Over lunch I discussed this with Dama, a Madagascan musician who was performing that evening and who has been participating in Southampton’s fantastic TNMundi project. However much ‘transcultural capital’ individuals like himself may enjoy, travelling between Europe and Africa across networks of musicians, promoters, producers and so on none of this counts when he has to cross a border into the EU. His immense capital is immediately devalued; few border officials (and the policy-makers who instruct them) speak only the language of threat and control, very often with racist undertones. Social theorists need to work harder to engage a hostile and suspicious audience, it seems to me.
And finally, I experienced a disconcerting turning-of-the-tables when Suzanne Wessendorf presented a paper based on her ethnography of an area of London I know very well, and where I used to live. The tensions she observed across class divides (primarily, rather than ‘race’ or ethnicity) rang very true from my own experience, and I found myself thinking of endless episodes that could have constituted moments from her fieldwork. It is not always comfortable, being the observed rather than the observer, however remotely and it reminded me just how important it is to present findings in the form of a dialogue, rather than an academic judgement if they are to be at all well received.
Mary
These are my links for 3 June to 10 June:
These are my links for 3 June from 09:43 to 10:40:
Title: Irish in Britain Seminar Series: Irish Connections: London’s County Associations, talk by Nicole McLennan
Location: The Old Staff Cafe, London Metropolitan University, Tower Building, 166-220 Holloway Road
Description: The Irish in Britain Seminar Series provides an opportunity for students, researchers and
scholars of Irish Studies to debate and disseminate the latest research in the field, in the light of
these developments. For over twenty years the Irish Studies Centre has provided a forum for
teaching, learning and research and this seminar series is an informal but informative means and
opportunity for anyone interested in engaging with current issues and research
about the Irish in Britain.
Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2009-06-10
End Time: 20:00
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