OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

I was invited to present at an event organised by Liz Stewart from the Museum of Liverpool on behalf of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. The event, ‘Getting There: Exploring the History of North West’s Transport Links’, was held at the Museum on 18th September 2013. My talk was called ‘Making Connections: Amateur Transport Films and Merseyside’s Historical Geography’. Other speakers included Sharon Brown from the Museum of Liverpool, Richard Knowles, Professor of Transport Geography at the University of Salford, and Martin Dodge, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester.

Liverpool Echo article on the publication of World Film Locations: Liverpool (Intellect 2013) featuring an interesting photo gallery of location filming images provided by the Liverpool Film Office:

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-on/film-tv/liverpools-hollywood-film-locations-recognised-6085119

There was also a short article on the book launch in the 26 Sept edition of the Echo. This features an embarrassingly contrived photo of myself, Roger Shannon (who organised the event), and the fabulous Liverpool-born actress Rita Tushingham:

See also Bay TV piece on the book launch:
http://www.baytvliverpool.com/vod/index.php?vid=EBV52472b9f766ec

//www.youtube.com/embed/uQf-PZWFMzY

The Liverpool edition of Intellect’s World Film Locations series has now been published, edited by Jez Conolly and Caroline Whelan. I have a short article in the book called ‘The Last of Liverpool: Liminal Journeys Around the Port City’, which takes as its main point of departure Derek Jarman’s 1987 film ‘The Last of England’, parts of which were shot in the city: http://www.amazon.co.uk/World-Film-Locations-Jez-Conolly/dp/178320026X

At long last the fieldwork for the Concrete Island project has now been completed (22-3 August 2013). 18 hours spent on a motorway island surrounded by the relentless flow, rhythms and roar of high-speed traffic. Returned with 15 hours of ambient sound recording, video footage, photographs, GPS tracks, not to mention a stiff back and lacerated arms from all the machete hacking through dense undergrowth. Over the coming months will work through the material gathered, which hopefully will form the basis of an academic paper, some creative writing, a short film, soundscape, map and photo gallery. All, or some of which will no doubt find its way onto the website in due course.

Information about the MyStreet project, part of Open City Docs festival activities founded by Michael Stewart from the anthropology dept at UCL.

http://mystreetfilms.com/#

MyStreet is a living on-line
archive of everyday life, encouraging you to make your mark and bring your area
to life through film.

MyStreet
revives the radical project at the centre of the 1930s Mass Observation
movement (founded by the anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet Charles Madge, and
film-maker Humphrey Jennings). This earlier quasi-anthropological attempt to
democratize ethnography in the service of the ‘everyday’, combined with the
potential of film as a vehicle of contestation within the public sphere led to
the creation of a digital project documenting life in the UK and above all in
London.

MyStreet has
set out to unleash the potential of a new form of collaborative anthropology,
to grasp the ‘minor’ importance of the non-canonical media expressions that My
Street provides a forum for, and also a means of dissemination. The project
rests on an appreciation of the transformative power of ‘minor’ practices but
also attempts to circumvent decaying print-age vehicles. MyStreet aims to
provide a window onto, and means of active assertion by, those marginalized
sections of the population whose voices are not heard or who, too often, the
state seeks to suppress and incarcerate.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=H9ypBjuQahA%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_detailpage

Andy Merrifield, Edward Soja and Maria Kaika debate on ‘Wither urban studies’ at the University of Manchester (16/11/2012)

http://player.vimeo.com/video/64849738
Tim Ingold is a preeminent anthropologist, Chair of Social Anthropology
at the University of Aberdeen. Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal
Society of Edinburgh and author of numerous books on anthropology. Taking an
unconventional view of his discipline. Professor Ingold tries to bring the “4
A’s” [anthropology, architecture, archaeology, and art] together, looking at
the ways in which environments are perceived, shaped, and understood.

http://anthem-group.net/2013/06/15/placing-lecture-tim-ingold/

Invited to give a talk at the ‘Placing Morecambe’ symposium organised by David Cooper and Jo Carruthers and held at the Dept. of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University on 13 June 2013. This event followed on from the ‘Practising Morecambe’ field excursion and group exercise on 30 May (which for me also involved a night in the legendary Midland Hotel, replete with endless piped 1930s dance music – eerily reminiscent of the barroom music from The Shining). In my presentation I discussed some ideas relating to spatial anthropology and the relationship between the critical and the creative. I also provided some reflections on the creative process and outputs developed from the Morecambe field exercise, including a slide show of images gleaned from my walks around the town, and a poem, ‘Frontierland’, inspired by the practice of ‘placing Morecambe’.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/event/4440

University of Tartu, Estonia
October 30 – November 1, 2013

The Sixth Autumn Conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) focuses on the issues of embodiment, personhood, subjectivity, and experience, as well as on the connection of these concepts with the understanding of cultural identity. The notion of identity is often treated in the framework of controversial efforts of dialogic interpretation. Recognising the individuality of the studied subjects, it becomes tricky to merge a variety of self-understandings into a coherent whole. Identity appears to us as an interconnected play of superficial and fundamental, ideological and physical, essentialised and dialogic. The conceptual initiative of our conference is inspired by these controversial cognitive dimensions. We encourage our colleagues to develop theoretical and empirical approaches through a conceptual matrix that focuses primarily on the proposed concepts of understanding and interpreting cultural identity.

Panel I: Revisiting key issues in the methodology of studying culture: reflexivity, representation and experience
Panel II: Negotiating embodied experiences
Panel III: Learning landscapes: stories, senses and sensitization
Panel IV: Dynamics between public and private
Panel V: Death as the transformation of personhood

Key Dates and Deadlines:
Abstracts Due: June 1st, 2013
Acceptance Notification: July 1st, 2013
Registration Deadline: September 15th, 2013
Full Paper Submission: October 15th, 2013

http://www.ut.ee/CECT/tegevus/sygiskonverentsid.html

This is the rather nice heritage plaque that Sara Cohen and Gurdeep Khabra kindly awarded me to mark my departure from the POPID project. A fitting gift for a project in which all things heritage – and plaques in particular – were the focus of much activity. This will hang pride of place on the wall of whichever office I might happen to find myself in the (hopefully) not too distant future, but for the time being I thought it appropriate to display here in virtual form (again, a fitting scenario in view of the theoretical discussions surrounding heritage and its ineluctably in/tangible properties…).

Here I am transacting/exchanging some knowledge with the good people of Rotterdam at the 2013 Film Festival (IFFR). George McKay and myself were invited to share some thoughts on the music documentary ‘Let Fury Have the Hour’ that had just been screened at the Scopitone cafe. The ‘Re/Soundings: Documenting Music and Memory’ programme was a HERA-funded partnership between the IFFR and the collaborative European research project POPID. The programme was organised as part of Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity conference which took place at the Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture, 30 Jan-1 Feb 2013.

The idea for the Re/Soundings knowledge exchange initiative was developed by myself and Sara Cohen and I drafted the successful HERA grant application which was costed as €40,000. However, for reasons probably best not gone into here, that remained the extent of our contribution to this initiative, bar this brief and last minute burst of KE activity (George and I both gave the film something of a pasting, by the way). It would be nice to be able to say that Sara and I could lay claim, or at least in part, to the official credit for this grant, or some of its monies, but alas that was not to be. Such is the nature of the collaborative research process I guess.