What is the most private city in the world?
The proliferation of high-security, privatised plazas is making parts of world cities such as London and Dubai reminiscent of an airport lounge
The Guardian, 26 March 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/26/what-most-private-city-world
ECREA TWG MEDIA & THE CITY 2015 CONFERENCE
Urban Media Studies: Concerns, intersections and challenges
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, 24–25 September 2015
Confirmed keynote speaker: Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory, Dept. of
Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University. Other keynote
speakers to be announced soon.
Call for papers and panels
Media related practices are grounded in the city – where the majority of human
population today lives – and media as both technologies and representations
pervade nearly all aspects of urban living, cutting through diverse forms of
public appearance, community, control, resistance and habitation.
As a result, none of the established perspectives in media studies, whether
that of democracy and participation, production and technology, representation
and use, or belonging and identity, can claim to have an exhaustive
understanding of their problematics without appreciating the urban context. In
the same way, no urban process can be fruitfully tackled without taking into
account the involvement of media and media related practices.
Yet, despite being closely – though unevenly – entwined, from small towns to
megalopolises, the two complexes, media and the city, have remained disjointed
in the scholarly analyses. In fact, it can be argued that for media scholars in
particular, the city has remained a terra incognita.
Wishing to revive the initial enthusiasm in media studies, which started as an
interdisciplinary endeavour, Urban Media Studies conference aspires to provide
a dialogic space for disciplines interested in mediated urbanism. We also hope
to stimulate critical reflections on the challenges of collaborating across
disciplinary boundaries. Thus, though speaking from the position of media
studies, we invite submissions from scholars who work in all relevant fields that
interface with the key issue of media and the city. These include, but are not
limited to, such fields as urban geography, urban sociology, architecture,
anthropology, science and technology studies, visual and sound/auditory culture
studies, sociology of the senses, and other related subfields.
We specifically welcome submissions which deal with the following themes and
approach them with an interdisciplinary curiosity – as potential intersections
between two or more fields of research:
Historical connections between urban studies and media studies
Urban spaces and media practices
Urban sociality and media
Mediation of urban daily life
Media, architecture and urban design
‘Media cities’ as production clusters and complexes
Performing and audiencing (in) the mediated city
Media, urban power, resistance and conflict
Media, gender and the city
Media, ethnicity and the city
Urban spaces of media consumption
Urban law in the digitally sustained cities
Mediated urban sensescapes
Urban, outdoor and ambient advertising
Fashion as urban communication
Urban gaming
Journalism and the city
The city as a mediated ecosystem
Urban mediation and spatial negotiations
Methodologies of urban media studies
Teaching about media and the city
We welcome both individual and multi-authored abstracts, and full panel
proposals (with four presentations; 15–20 minutes per presentation). In the
case of panel proposals, the candidate chair should provide a title and a short
general description of the proposed panel, together with the abstracts of all
presenters.
In addition to conventional academic presentations of original theoretical,
methodological and/or empirical research of any of the above or other related
themes, we encourage practice-based presentations, like urban films and
documentaries, sonic projects and other exploratory artwork that probe issues
of media and the city.
Abstract proposals (300 words) for presentations and panels, together with
short bios, should be submitted tomediacity.twg@gmail.com
by May 1st, 2015. Authors will be informed of acceptance by June 1st, 2015.
The conference will also feature a special dialogic plenary where participants
from different disciplines will be invited to share views on their work in the
context of media and the city.
As part of our commitment to stimulate interaction between scholars from
different disciplines, we shall also be organising a guided urban exploration
of Zagreb’s industrial, modernist/utopian architectural heritage, and
post-industrial urban developments.
A selection of papers will be published in an edited book and/or in a journal
special issue.
Conference fee is 50 Euros for ECREA members, 70 Euros for non-members. The fee
will cover conference materials, and coffee and lunch both days.
Any queries should be sent to conference organizers Seija Ridell (University of
Tampere, Finland), Simone Tosoni (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and
Zlatan Krajina (University of Zagreb, Croatia). Please use the conference
e-mail address:mediacity.twg@gmail.com.
OBS. For the conference updates, please follow the Media& the City
websites onhttp://twg.ecrea.eu/MC/ andhttps://www.facebook.com/mediaandthecity
In the two years that have passed since the broadcast of the ITV documentary Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy in October 2012 the impact of the posthumous revelations about the scale and depravity of Jimmy Savile’s crimes, which precipitated the launch of the police investigation Operation Yewtree, has been far-reaching. At the beginning of December, Ray Teret, a DJ and long-standing friend of Savile was the latest public figure to be found guilty of sexual abuse allegations that stretched back decades. And just this week yet another former Radio 1 DJ, Chris Denning, was convicted of the sexual abuse of young boys in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Other household names that have similarly fallen precipitously from grace include musician and entertainer Rolf Harris, DJ Dave Lee Travis, radio and television presenter Stuart Hall, and the public relations advisor Max Clifford. That the likes of Savile, Harris, Hall and, to a lesser extent, Travis have at various times all been prominent fixtures in British popular culture has meant that their ‘legacy’ as entertainers and celebrities – for decades so indelibly entwined with the BBC and its broadcasting heritage – now casts a much darker shadow; a legacy that is no less part of this putative ‘heritage’, however much audiences may now wish to erase it from the nation’s collective memory banks.
In August the near fever-pitch excitement that greeted Kate Bush’s first live performances since 1979 was marred only by the realisation that Rolf Harris’s contribution to Bush’s 2005 album Aerial (and 1982’s The Dreaming) might now be seen in a different and altogether less palatable light (Harris was convicted in June for a series of indecent assaults). If programming one’s CD player or iPod to skip (or delete) the offending tracks offers one way of ‘wiping’ a now despoiled musical legacy, then it is a formula similar to that which TV programmers and archivists have found themselves increasingly having to adopt. Such are the expectations placed upon broadcasters to ensure that all archival traces of Savile and his ilk remain buried in the vaults (outside, that is, of the discursive context of their shaming), that when an otherwise innocuous item slips through (as with the impersonation of Savile that appeared in a repeated episode of the children’s television programme The Tweenies) it is almost as if BBC heads are expected to roll.
In its capacity as curator of Britain’s televised popular music heritage, the BBC’s reliance on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of archival footage to draw on for inexpensive nostalgia programming content has, post-Savile, been severely tested. From 2011, BBC4 started repeating weekly episodes of the long-running BBC chart show Top of the Pops originally aired in 1976. The brief was relatively straightforward: the repeats would mirror those transmitted twenty-five years earlier with episodes shown in succession on a week-by-week basis. However, the appearance of regular hosts Savile and Travis, or disgraced 1970s pop star Gary Glitter (who has convictions for child sexual abuse and possession of child pornography) has resulted in certain episodes having to be omitted. In the wake of the Savile scandal in 2012 the then BBC4 controller Richard Klein considered axing the classic re-runs from the 1970s, but in response to reportedly ‘overwhelming’ public demand he decided to maintain the repeats ‘for the foreseeable future’. The more pragmatic calculation that, on balance, there was still a sufficient amount of unsullied archival material to draw on no doubt also informed Klein’s decision: ‘Looking at it, we decided we will not be showing either the DLT or Jimmy Savile fronted shows but that left us plenty of Top of the Pops to show’.
Not that any of this can, of course, be confined just to Top of the Pops. Indeed, an episode of Savile’s own Clunk Click programme from the 1970s, featuring Savile and Gary Glitter ‘helping themselves’ to a group of girls from the studio audience, makes for particularly disturbing viewing. But just as the Savile scandal and others like it bring the wider culture, customs and practices of the BBC as an institution into the frame of discussion and debate, so too does consideration of these otherwise ‘aberrant’ or isolated cases throw a critical spotlight across the wider broadcasting landscape and culture of the 1960s and 70s. As much as it is easy or desirable to heap the pathological dysfunction squarely on the perpetrators themselves, there is nevertheless a broader societal context that has bearing on questions of why or how such actions were able to be perpetrated at such a scale over such long periods (especially in view of the fact that, as many testimonies have since demonstrated, there was considerable rumour and suspicion about what was going on as far back, in the case of Savile, as the 1960s).
If framed just in terms of ‘the 1970s’, there has emerged, post-Savile, a sense that the decade itself can or perhaps should be held to account in order to fully expunge certain values, cultural norms and attitudes which ‘we’ (i.e. hose who inhabit the 2010s) now recognise as completely and utterly abhorrent. Such temporal ‘othering’, while on the one hand functioning to demarcate a clear line of acceptability and unacceptability, on the other carries with it the risk of complacency insofar as what has been morally consigned to an earlier era is deemed to be something from which the 2010s have become in some way immune. A barometer by which these shifts in attitudes towards a more ambivalent sense of a popular cultural past can be measured (at least in part) is that of ‘nostalgia’.
Nostalgia shows have become a staple of television programme schedules, not least for the appeal they offer to broadcasters looking to plunder the archive for cheap recyclable content (and for whom ‘the past’ is an inexhaustible commodity that just keeps on giving). Programmes such as BBC’s I Love the 70s (or their 1980s or 90s variants) have since the early 2000s traded on a reflective nostalgia that music journalist Simon Reynolds has dubbed ‘retromania’. Despite its adherence to the same formulaic narrative style (consisting of celebrity ‘talking heads’ commenting on items or programme clips the producers had pre-selected), a marked departure from the genre was the recent Channel Four two-part documentary It Was Alright in the 1970s¸ broadcast in November 2014. The playful and irreverent take on all things ‘retro’ that was evident in I Love the 1970s gives way, in It Was Alright in the 1970s to an examination of the social and cultural mores of decade now seen through the prism of Savile and Operation Yewtree. Whereas in the earlier nostalgia shows questions of taste were typically pitched on aesthetic and kitsch terms, in this more recent example what is considered ‘distasteful’ relates more to prevailing attitudes of sexism, homophobia and racism. Participants are shown responding to footage taken from a range of 1970s television programmes (The Black and White Mistrels Show, Benny Hill, and Casanova ’73, to name but a few), their reactions typically ranging from jaw-dropping disbelief, to stunned silence or comic outrage. Despite the title, and overshadowed by the legacy of Savile, the shift in tone that is evident in the programme seems to stem from the realisation that things were clearly far from alright in the 1970s and that, with more prosecutions still to come and the reputation (and potential complicity) of the BBC under forensic scrutiny (the Dame Janet Smith Review is due in early 2015), the extent to which it wasn’t so has yet to fully unravel.
As well as the convictions of Teret and Denning that have been in the news ver the last couple of weeks, these issues have lurched their way back into my thoughts of late partly through the process of preparing a lecture called ‘Retromania! Popular Culture and Nostalgia’ as part of the new third year module Mediating the Past I am teaching. However unpalatable the subject matter, the issues raised nevertheless touch on debates surrounding the flip side of cultural memory – namely ‘erasure’ and the cultural politics of forgetting – and also the way in which a critical focus on nostalgia can shed valuable insights into the ambivalent relationships that bind present and past popular mediascapes.
Another factor that has prompted the reflections that have developed into this blog entry is the recent publication of the edited collection Sites of Popular Music Heritage (Routledge, 2014), which I co-edited with Sara Cohen and Marion Leonard from the School of Music, and Rob Knifton, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Music and now based at Kingston University. In the book, Sara and I contribute a chapter called ‘Unveiling Memory: Blue Plaques as In/tangible Markers of Popular Music Heritage’ that briefly discusses the Savile case, albeit in the context of material markers of heritage and memory. As with the process of ‘unmarking’ or erasing memory in the digital domain, the removal of
heritage plaques becomes a deeply symbolic gesture in itself. In the case of Savile, a plaque that had been erected at his former home in North Yorkshire by Scarborough Civic Society was removed by the local authorities who also stripped Savile of all other honours that had been bestowed on him over the years. This official gesture followed on from the display of more ‘unofficial’ gestures in the form of graffiti that had been daubed on the memorial plaque. Alongside the words ‘philanthropist and entertainer lived here’ had been added ‘paedophile’ and ‘rapist’. In addition to this, and to complete the official dishonouring of the former television star, Savile’s ostentatious headstone was removed and dumped in a skip to be used as landfill, leaving the body lying in an unmarked grave.
Lastly, Savile reared his ugly head once more recently when revisiting the Merseybeat-era film Ferry Cross the Mersey (Jeremy Summers, 1965), in which he appears in a lengthy scene shot in the Locarno Ballroom (now The Liverpool Olympia). The film has been little seen since its 1960s release (nor has it been officially released on video or DVD) and in this respect the appearance of Savile will have no doubt sealed its fate for good. That said, despite or because of this I would be interested to gauge what local public reaction to the film is or would be, if for no other reason that it is one of the few Liverpool feature films made in the 1960s and as such is an important part of the city’s filmic (and Merseybeat) heritage, irrespective of any cinematic or aesthetic merits (it has few) or its corrosive association with Savile. While the temptation to bury the film for good or edit out the scenes involving Savile is certainly a valid and persuasive option, a more honest and appropriate response would be to recognise it as a part of a legacy or heritage that, warts and all, is what it is. In this respect – and if, as I hope, a public screening can be organised – the film might provide a focus of discussion that productively explores the role of nostalgia and cultural memory – in all its facets and forms – in shaping narratives of a city’s popular cultural past and the ways these are refracted through the mediascapes of the present.
Les Roberts
A side venture that has emerged from the Nick Cave film project ‘20000 Days on Earth’ is a virtual museum called ‘Museum of Important Shit’. Its creators are the film’s directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. It is a happy coincidence from my window on the world given that the new module I am writing called ‘Mediating the Past’ includes a practical exercise where students are required to curate and upload their own virtual shit (i.e. memories and pop culture memorabilia). I am very much looking forward to seeing the film this week as well…
Forsyth and Pollard explain the background to the museum project below:
“This virtual Museum catalogues the things that remind us of those transformative moments that make us who we are, and unlocks the stories connected to them.
This whole thing started with an old piece of chewing gum. Seriously.
We were shooting the film and Nick told us this spine-tingling story. Nina Simone had been a nightmare backstage at one of her final gigs. But when she walked on and sat down, she took the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano, and… transformed. It was one of those rare moments. Nick felt the gears of his heart change. We’ve all had experiences like this.
A few weeks later, we’re shooting another scene. Nick is asking bandmate Warren Ellis if he remembers that Nina Simone gig. Warren interrupts: “I have that gum” he says. And he really does. A pathetic looking dirty piece of gum, wrapped in a towel.
As Nick says in the film, “It’s shit, but it’s important shit. And that’s what this Museum is all about. We might not all have the masticated detritus of a jazz legend tucked away, but we all accumulate objects that have little financial value, but they hold the stories of the things that make us who we are. The Museum will unlock these transformative moments that define our very being. We urge you to share them with us, with the Museum, with the world.”
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
London, September 2014.
This is quite an old Guardian article now (August 2012), but as I just found a print copy whilst sorting out some old papers I thought it worth posting to keep a record of it.
How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us
Digital maps on smartphones are brilliantly useful tools, but what sort of information do they gather about us – and how do they shape the way we look at the world?:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/28/google-apple-digital-mapping
I was very saddened to learn of the death from cancer of my PhD supervisor Elizabeth Lebas. While looking up details of her 2011 book Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema 1920-1980 a couple of days ago I unexpectedly came across her obituary published in The Guardian on 1 July.
Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics
15 – 19 June 2015
TALLINN & TARTU, ESTONIA
The Nordic Geographers Meeting is a biennial meeting of originally Nordic geographers that has grown into a considerable international event and for its 6th meeting expand its geography to include Estonia. Previous meetings were held in Lund, Sweden (2005); Bergen, Norway (2007); Turku, Finland (2009); Roskilde, Denmark (2011), and Reykjavík, Iceland (2013).The meeting will thus be held in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia on 15 – 19 June 2015. It is jointly organised by the Estonian Geographical Society, Tallinn Univeristy, University of Tartu, and Estonian University of Life Sciences.
Estonian Geographical Society in cooperation with Estonian universities invites session proposals for the 6th Nordic Geographers Meeting in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia on 15 – 19 June 2015 on the theme “Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics“. Both human and physical geographers are encouraged to participate under this broad heading but the organisers aim at highlighting the connections between nature (climate) and imagination, culture contacts between East and West (across and beyond the Baltic to the Far East, the Americas and Oceania) including geographical explorations and the issues of interpretation and politics (including being lost or found in translation).
Conference information here.
http://www.tlu.ee/en/ngm2015
Interesting article by Will Self on English Heritage and the newly opened Stonehenge visitor centre.
The summer solstice, King Arthur, the Holy Grail … Stonehenge is supposed to be a site of myths and mystery. But with timed tickets and a £27m visitor centre, does it herald a rampant commercialisation of our heritage?…
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/21/from-heritage-to-heretics-stonehenge-making-history
New book: International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power, Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds
International Politics and Film introduces readers to the representational qualities of film but also draws attention to how the relationship between the visual and the spatial is constitutive of international politics. Using four themes – borders, the state of exception, homeland and distant others – the territorial and imaginative dimensions of international affairs in particular are highlighted. But this volume also makes clear that international politics is not just something ‘out there’; film helps us better understand how it is also part of everyday life within the state – affecting individuals and communities in different ways depending on axes of difference such as gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16971-4/international-politics-and-film
Spaces and Mobilities in
Mediatized Worlds
An Interdisciplinary
International Conference
Karlstad, SWEDEN, 5-8 May 2015
GeoMedia 2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized academic field. GeoMedia 2015 welcomes scholars of all disciplines who address questions pertaining to the space-mobility-media-communication nexus and want to take part in current epistemological discussions regarding communication geography and its future(s).
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Mustafa Dikec – Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Mimi Sheller – Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA
John Tomlinson – Nottingham Trent University, UK
Confirmed plenary panel:
Paul C. Adams (chair) – University of Texas at
Austin, USA
Julie Cupples – University of Edinburgh, UK
Dana Diminescu – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
Paris, France
Hille Koskela – University of Turku, Finland
Confirmed films & directors:
“The Forgotten Space” – Noël Burch (director)
“Cosmopolitanism” – Erik Gandini (director)
Abstract submissions:
GeoMedia 2015 welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as thematic panels in English through www.geomedia.se
Individual paper proposals: The author submits an abstract of 200-250 words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 5 papers according to thematic area.
Thematic panel proposals: The chair of the panel submits a proposal consisting of 4-5 individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) along with a general panel presentation of 200-250 words.
Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:–
Communication geographies
– Mobilities and locative media
– Power geometries of/in motion
– “Newsworthy” spaces
– Mobilities, flows and new media
– Material geographies of media
– Policy mobilities and power
– Media ecologies
– Lifestyle and tourism mobilities
– Pervasive media
– Cinematic geographies
– Mobility and governance
– New media and the productions of place/space
– Urban and rural media spaces
– Geographies of media and culture industries
– Art and event spaces
We plan to put together an anthology (not a proceedings) of selected papers and publish it with an established international scholarly press. Information will be provided to conference participants.
Conference Timeline
August 16: Submission system opens
October 10 2014: Deadline for thematic panel proposals
December 1 2014: Deadline for individual paper proposals
December 15: Registration opens
January 16 2015: Notes of acceptance
March 31 2015: Last day of registration
Conference website:
Information about the registration, conference program, venue, social events and practical arrangements, will be posted continuously at the conference website: www.geomedia.se
Contact: you can reach us at info@geomedia.se
Organizers and venue:
GeoMedia 2015 is hosted by the Department of Geography, Media and
Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden.
Mekonnen
Tesfahuney, Conference General
Linda
Ryan Bengtsson, GeoMedia Co-ordinator
André Jansson,
Director of GeoMedia
CONFERENCE STATEMENT
GeoMedia
2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized academic field.
As stated by a number of scholars during the last decade, there are obvious reasons as to why such a field has emerged. Notably, recent developments in terms of expanding (trans)media technologies/networks together with intensified forms of mobility (migration, tourism, commuting, etc.) have had ambiguous spatial consequences: they alter the ways in which spaces and places are produced; they create new hybrid and interstitial spaces, and they affect how people establish senses of belonging and understandings of the world. Spatial practices and experiences, whether we look at the mundane level of everyday life or institutionalized processes such as regional governance or cultural production, are thus increasingly mediatized, i.e., saturated by or dependent on various media technologies and symbolic flows. Traditional mass media, and their modes of interpreting and encoding the world, are being supplemented by various forms of privatized media that sometimes have direct geographical impacts on social life; materially (e.g., portable digital devices) and representationally (e.g., geo-tagging).
At the same time, the conditions for communication in general and media practices in particular become more complex in times of intensified mobility and porous (territorial) boundaries: the places and spaces of symbolic circulation are no longer as clear-cut as they used to be, and questions of policies and legislations pertaining to media infrastructures and content circulation become more open-ended. Pre-established centres of mediated and symbolic power are contested.
These on-going transformations account for converging research agendas among geographers and media/film scholars. Communication geography is also an epistemological project that must be open to neighbouring fields such as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and political science. The mediatized relations between spatial processes and communication can be related to overarching transformations of modern, capitalist societies, and to the enduring significance of economic, cultural and social power structures. Whereas the means and expressions of spatial production (including phenomena ranging from the everyday textures of the domestic sphere to ideologies of urban transformation and place branding) may alter in tandem with media developments, these are still shaped by gender, ethnicity and class relations. Whereas concepts such as communication, place and distance are in need of problematization, as suggested by various epistemological “turns” (e.g. the “spatial turn”, the “mobility turn” and the “cultural turn”), such discussions have to be framed by structural understandings of society as well as micro-oriented accounts of human nature and agency.
‘The Leisure Commons: A
Spatial History of Web 2.0’, by Payal Arora, has just been published by the Routledge
Science, Technology & Society Series
About the book: There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an
unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing,
producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network
sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a
utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this
cyberleisure geography. This book investigates the digital public sphere
by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric
of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes
the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban
commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on
corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital
commons. This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through
multiple forms of public parks such as Protest Parks, Walled Gardens,
Corporate Parks, Fantasy Parks, and Global Parks, addressing issues such
as virtual activism, online privacy/surveillance, digital labor,
branding, and globalization of digital networks. Ranging from the 19th
century British factory garden to Tokyo Disneyland, this book offers
numerous spatial metaphors to bring to life aspects of new media spaces.
Readers looking for an interdisciplinary, historical and spatial
approach to staid Web 2.0 discourses will undoubtedly benefit from this
text.
New book out by William Atkins: The Moor: Lives Landscape Literature (Faber & Faber, 2014)
Guardian review of book here
On 22 May I presented a paper at a symposium held at LJMU, organised by Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool) and Lydia Papadimitriou (LJMU) – ‘TV is the New Cinema: Exploring the Erosion of Boundaries between two Media’.
My paper – currently work in progress – is titled: ‘Big Country, Small Screen: Exploring the Hinterlands of the British Procedural Drama’.
Abstract:
It is perhaps something of a truism to observe that the significance of landscape in screen studies of the crime procedural drama is partly a reflection on the geographical situatedness of the crime mise-en-scène. The crime, and the events – the narratives – that are precipitated by the fact of its occurrence, take place in specific spaces and locations. They are, in other words, spatial stories; an observation that draws succour from writer and
filmmaker Chris Petit’s claim that crime reconstruction programmes, such BBC’s Crimewatch, are unique insofar they are all about place (Brown 1995; Roberts 2014). Despite this otherwise elemental spatial underpinning, venture beyond the specifically urban environments of, for example, neo-noir or the detective film, and the critical correlation between screen, crime and landscape is one that is more than likely to equate the expansiveness of geography to that of the screen. As with discussions of place, landscape and the moving image more generally – and as is attested to by the growing body of literature focused on these areas of debate – it is cinema rather than television that is the default medium around which such discussions are seen to coalesce, whether this be the snowbound wilderness of North Dakota in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, or the remote Anatolian steppe of Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. However, in the wake of the much discussed phenomenon of so-called ‘Nordic Noir’ – and, in particular, the dramas The Killing and The Bridge – the significance of Landscape (with a capital L) in relation to the police procedural has had something of a small-screen renaissance. In this paper I discuss this with specific reference to recent productions set and filmed in Britain. Broadchurch (2013) shot in West Dorset, Southcliffe (2013) filmed in and around Faversham and the North Kent marshes, and Hinterland (Y Gwyll) (2013), filmed in and around the Welsh coastal resort of Aberystwyth in Ceredigion, all share something of a ‘post-Nordic-noir’ family resemblance insofar as landscape and location are themselves presented as central characters, prompting reflection on what these narratives reveal about ideas of place and the role of topography and landscape in the cultural imaginary of the British procedural drama.
Guardian article
about free eBook, On the Road for
17527 Miles by
Gregor Weichbrodt, which maps the route of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, with
Google driving instructions.
Read article here
Access eBook here
New book by Alastair Bonnett: Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places and What They Tell Us About the World (Aurum Press Ltd, 2014)
Review of book in The Guardian – read here
Review in The Telegraph – read here
The Geography of Poverty: www.geographyofpoverty.com/
Reblogged from Progressive Geographies
What is Space: a Post-Disciplinary
Workshop on the Return of an Old Debate
Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.
17 June 2014. Poster here.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces
frightens me (Pascal, Thoughts, 1964)
Space is the everywhere of modern thought. It is
the flesh that flatters the bones of theory. It is an all-purpose nostrum to be
applied whenever things look sticky. (Crang and Thrift, Thinking Space, 2000)
The
question of space has in both the humanities and the social sciences recently
regained prominence on academic agendas. The so-called ‘spatial turn’,
initially set in motion by geographers, has allowed historians, philosophers,
sociologists, anthropologists, artists and others to return to the long
abandoned, albeit fundamental, question of what space is. This reengagement has
resulted in a gradual, ongoing questioning and re-opening of the great debates
that earlier characterised the European Renaissance. Contemporary discussions
and writings about space have led to a multiplication of literal and
metaphorical spatial references ranging from ‘location’, ‘terrain’, ‘site’,
‘region’ among countless others. This intellectual enrichment means however
also that the question of space has become an increasingly messy, ambiguous and
sometimes even incongruous affair.
This workshop invites junior
and senior academics from across the University to explain and demonstrate how
they conceptualise space in their work. We believe that the problem of space is
too important to be left to one discipline. The objective of this one-day
workshop is therefore to deterritorialise and transcend the longstanding
disciplinary academic divisions and to reengage academics from all departments
in an attempt to build bridges over the vast rivers that have come to divide
us. The goal is not so much to arrive at a common consensus, nor to find a
universally acceptable solution to the fundamental problem that space poses to
us, but to openly start questioning and speculating again about the meaning we
give to the concept.
We invite abstracts of no more
than 300 words for papers of approximately 20 minutes in length, accompanied by
a short biographical note. Please email all abstracts and inquiries to the
convenor, Dr Marijn Nieuwehuis. The deadline for the receipt of all abstracts is
the 6th of May 2014. We can discuss the possibilities of combining
the workshop papers into an edited volume.
This workshop is funded by the Institute of
Advanced Study, University of Warwick.
New Publication: Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space
Edited by Jennifer M. Bean, Laura Horak, and Anupama Kapse (Indiana University Press, 2014).
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/fi/38400-silent-cinema-and-the-politics-of-space.html
Video: David Harvey and Andy Merrifield in conversation at Birkbeck:
Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 Palestine back on the map
Guardian article about an app designed by the Israeli activist organisation Zochrot. The i-Nakba phone app will allow users to locate any Arab village that was abandoned during the 1948 war on an interactive map, learn about its history (including, in many cases, the Jewish presence that replaced it), and add photos, comments and data.
Read more at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/nakba-israel-palestine-zochrot-history
