Ben Taylor reports on our symposium, Media and Cultural Studies @ NTU - the past, the present, the future - held on 8 February 2013
While Nottingham Trent University has long been associated
with media, cultural and communication studies (a Communication Studies degree
was first established here in the early 1980s), the annual Media & Cultural
Studies symposium this year marked the 21st birthday of the launch
of Joint Honours degrees in the subject at the institution. It used this
anniversary to reflect on the current state of the discipline, on its history,
and on emerging issues and developments.
The organisers were pleased that a Belgian scholar, who was visiting NTU
on an Erasmus exchange, was able to contribute to the symposium. They were also
happy to be able to welcome back some graduates and former colleagues as
contributors.
The first session saw Ben Taylor (NTU) talk about the way in
which waste has been neglected within media studies. Focusing in particular on
e-waste, he argued that, while the discipline has successfully explored the
dynamics of media production, the emergence of new media, and the way in which
media technologies have been integrated into everyday life, it has tended to
ignore the way in which we replace and discard those technologies. He called
for the discipline to extend its analysis of the consumption of media
technologies so that the dynamics of e-waste (planned obsolescence, recycling,
disposal) could be more carefully addressed. The session also saw Bob Jeffery
(Sheffield Hallam) talk about his research on the impact of gentrification in
Salford. Bob located his initial interest in urban sociology within the
discipline of cultural studies, and he used Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of
hysteresis to examine the friction between the habitus of young people who had
been brought up in Salford, and the new forms of urban living ushered in by the
development of middle-class housing facilities, work and retail spaces. Drawing
on ethnographic work he had undertaken in the wake of the 2011 riots, he showed
how these new geographies had exacerbated social divisions within the area.
In the second session, Georgia Stone (NTU) reflected on the
development of media practices over the last 21 years, and she screened some
work made by students at NTU in the early 1990s. It was fascinating to see this
work, not only because it demonstrated how significantly media technologies
have changed in the intervening years, but also because, in many cases, the
work nevertheless still stood up in its own right as examples of good
film-making, often taking familiar, everyday practices (crossing the city in
heavy traffic, cutting a piece of cheese) and rendering them unfamiliar. Gary Needham (NTU) then explored the
proximity between the discipline of cultural studies and the work of Andy
Warhol. While Warhol’s interest in popular culture has often been noted
(evidenced by the subject matter of many of his screen prints, for example),
Gary turned instead to Warhol’s Time
Capsules, a series of 600 cardboard boxes in which, month by month, Warhol
placed the ephemera of everyday life. Gary argued that, with this interrogation
of the prosaic, Warhol shared one of the central preoccupations of cultural
studies, and he suggested that his work was thus of significant pedagogic value
to the discipline.
In the third session, Alexander Dhoest (Antwerp University)
considered the nature of media research in Belgian, and specifically
Flemish-speaking, universities. He argued that such research tended to work
within social scientific, and often quantitative, paradigms, and that it
regularly had an explicit policy-related perspective. He proceeded to show how
British media and cultural studies, with its more qualitative foundations,
nevertheless had had an impact on the field, and he used this to reflect on
some of the strengths and weaknesses of both the British, and the Flemish,
traditions. It was really useful to think about the geographical, as well as
the historical, development of the discipline, and about what happens to fields
of academic enquiry as they are taken up in different national contexts.
The final session brought together two papers which focused
on female performances in recent film and television. Donna Peberdy
(Southampton Solent University) undertook a detailed analysis of the opening
scene of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous
Method (2011), in which Keira Knightley’s character, Sabina Spielrein, first visits Carl Jung. Donna
showed how Knightley’s performance of hysteria had proved controversial
in reviews of the film, and how she had been accused of over-acting. Rather
than simply endorsing such reviews, however, Donna reflected on the
difficulties of performing perversion, and the manner in which the condition of
hysteria is represented in the film as a whole. Estella Tincknell (University
of the West of England) then addressed two serials which have dominated Sunday
night television schedules in the UK in recent months: Downton Abbey and Call the
Midwife. Both set in the past (1912 onwards and the 1950s respectively),
Estella contrasted the politics of nostalgia in each serial, and the way in
which social class is located in each. What the programmes shared, however, she
argued, was the centrality they gave to ageing women in a culture where such
representations tend to live at the margins.
The symposium allowed participants to take stock of media
and cultural studies, and the range of topics addressed across the papers
reflected the diverse and eclectic nature of the discipline. It thus served as
a useful way to mark this particular anniversary at NTU. Unfortunately, one of
the planned contributors, Roger Bromley (University of Nottingham), was not
able to take part on the day, so we look forward to hearing his paper, about
the origins of cultural studies and John Berger’s A Seventh Man (1975), on another occasion.
