Research Symposium: Crime and Media in Historical and Contemporary Perspective

Date: Friday 15 November 2013

Time: 9.30-4.30

Location and Room Details: GEE 004

Clifton Campus

NG11 8NS

The symposium is a free event but if you plan to attend please email Simon Cross. Refreshments will be available but lunch is not provided. However, hot meals and sandwiches can be purchased on campus. Following the event speakers will continue discussions in a local hostelry and restaurant in the city centre about 15 minute walk to the train station. You will be welcome to join us for dinner before your onward journey but for restaurant booking purposes you must email Simon Cross no later than 1 November.

Bus details from Nottingham train station: Delegates can get the Number 4 Uni-Link Bus outside Nottingham station. The bust stop is on the main road just outside the train station and at the Starbucks on the corner. The bus stop is just a few doors down from Starbucks so find that and you are more or less at the bust stop – there are a few stops and you can’t really miss them. The bus is very regular around 8 minutes between each service and comes directly into the campus with a journey time of around 15 minutes. Link to bus timetables are here.

Arriving by car: delegates arriving by car and using ‘sat nav’ please note the postal code above. Enter through the south entrance gate and car park attendants will direct you.

Signs directing you to the symposium location will be posted from the George Eliot building reception. Please also consult the Clifton Campus map.

Programme

9.30-9.55 Welcome and registration.

10.00-11.15 Professor Yvonne Jewkes, Department of Criminology, University of Leicester.

Title: Punishment in black and white: penal ‘hell-holes’, popular media and mass incarceration.

In recent years, the prison has been analogously compared to transportation and slavery; the Jim Crow system; the urban ghetto; a new apartheid; and an embodiment ofstate power and security apparatuses in post 9/11 societies. In all these analyses imprisonment is explicitly linked to racially motivated processes of criminalization andsegregation. A further analogous framework by which prisons might be viewed and understood, and the focus of this article, is that of Hell. Drawing on images from Dante's Inferno, the cultural purchase of which remains undiminished seven hundred years after it was written, this article argues that the social exclusion and mass imprisonment of young, black men is related to broader historical and cultural practices of discrimination and to contemporary, mediated discourses of ‘othering’. Moreover, the article suggests that not only can the prison be understood through the lens of darkness and lightness, Heaven and Hell, but that such metaphors serve to justify and authorize the prison as hell-hole.

Dr Maggie Wykes, School of Law, University of Sheffield.

Title: What’s law gotta do with it? Comparing the failure to successfully prevent or prosecute sexual violence in England and South Africa.

With abysmal regularity the news in the UK and South Africa tells stories of sexual violence. In April 2013 there was a:

            Crime that shocked South Africa, 17-year-old Anene Booysen was brutally gang-raped. Her throat was slit; her fingers and legs shattered. The attackers had stuck a broken glass bottle inside her body and left her for dead on a construction site (The Daily Beast 10/02/2013).

While such extreme violence is relatively rare in South Africa it is a country where violence accompanies much crime and girls talk not of if they are raped but when. Whilst in the UK a 2013 review found institutions charged with the care of children implicated in sexual violence:

           

            A nursery worker who raped a toddler had a "special relationship" with her that Ofsted and a council were aware of but failed to stop (BBC news 27/08/2013).

This paper explores the role of law in relation to such sexual violence in England and South Africa to argue that rather than being part of the solution law is inevitably part of the problem. The background to this paper is a comparative and evaluative cross cultural project involving collaboration between the Centre for Criminological Research in the

School of Law, University of Sheffield, UK and the Gender, Health and Justice

Research Unit at the University of Cape Town South Africa and funded by the British Academy. Both cities and indeed both countries have on-going high levels of violence against women, both sexual and domestic, which have eluded significant efforts to contain and reduce them despite consistent efforts in the UK since the later 1970s.

South Africa and England share jurisdictional history but support criminal justice

systems in radically different cultures. By comparing and evaluating the law in relation to the crimes that typify sexual violence and the contexts in which it is occurring  it is hoped to illuminate inhibitors to change. These inhibitors meant that even as the new law was launched in South Africa it was possible to state rather pessimistically that ‘at the very minimum, the law, and in particular the new definition of rape, will aid in providing us with a slightly more accurate count of the lived experiences of sexual violence in South Africa. Of course, the ‘body count’ does very little to protect those attempting to secure justice’ (Artz and Smythe 2007:17). Whilst in England the failure of the criminal justice system to deal with ‘rape….. encapsulates the sheer inadequacy of the law in relation to gendered violence and the deeply gendered assumptions that surround legal responses to it’ (Wykes and Welsh 2009:111).

So this paper asks a deceptively simple question why is the law not working in relation to sexual violence?

11.30-1.00 Dr Judith Rowbotham, Director SOLON, London.

Title: A ‘Pressing’ Problem – Does Prison Work? Victorian Discussions on Penal Servitude and Their Modern Echoes.

The Victorian debate over whether prison worked was aired very substantially in the press of the day, because legal professionals were, in this period, the key reporters and journalists writing up issues of crime and punishment for the consumption of interested readers. The hostility of many barristers to the use of penal servitude at home (as opposed to finding a new place to transport those convicted of serious crimes) meant that issues like the length of prison sentences and the management of prison daily life were of great contemporary concern, along with the issue of repeat offending. Victorian reportage intended to put pressure on both the courts and government: and there are, today, clear echoes of a similar pressure being attempted by the modern media. This paper explores the differences between substance and representation of punishment and the role of the media in shaping the dialogue between the public and the criminal justice process.

Dr Samantha Pegg, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University.

Title: Rationalising the Irrational – Victorian Print Presentations of Insanity Pleas.

As a defence where morality, medical opinion and substantive law meet, insanity has provoked significant press debate. The substantive legal rules governing the defence (articulated in McNaghten’s case 1843) are strict, with the core of the defence a failure to realise the nature and quality of the act or that that act was legally wrong. Despite these stringent legal rules the Victorians were accustomed to successful pleas of insanity, often based on meagre evidence. Victorian juries often allowed themselves a significant degree of latitude in allowing the defence, particularly when the defendants were women. Although the House of Lords had ascertained the legal guidelines, it was for the populous by way of the jury to administer the law and they were undoubtedly subject to the sway of the press. Of course the press were not just recounting these criminal cases but forcefully commenting upon the veracity of the defence and the character of the defendants. It is perhaps surprising the press then frequently found jury decisions wanting; believing insanity was being used as a device to unjustifiably mitigate punishment. This paper explores the ways in which the press reported upon these insanity pleas and sought to shape public understanding of the operation and availability of this defence.

Lunch: 1.00-1.55

2.00-3.30 Dr Simon Cross, Department of English and Media, Nottingham Trent University.

Grooming the nation? Media reporting of Jimmy Savile’s life, death and life-after-death.

The late broadcaster and charity fund raiser Jimmy Savile has been exposed as one of the country’s most prolific sexual offenders. This paper begins with profiles of Savile’s celebrity in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that show his sexual predilection for girls and teenagers was an open secret. This then begs the question why in the 1990s and 2000s, when newspaper exposes of sexual offenders were nationally prominent, there was no investigation into Savile’s sexual offending. The paper illustrates how press and TV tributes to Savile’s ‘good life’ held the line on Savile’s tangible achievements after his death which is juxtaposed with press coverage detailing the extent of his sexual offending. The paper concludes by discussing inter-relations of power and culpability that enabled Savile to molest hundreds of victims with impunity.

Lieve Gies, Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester.

Title: An anti-human rights culture? The popular press and the Human Rights Act.

One of the principal aims of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was to bring forth a human rights culture and spread human rights values throughout society. Supporters of the HRA have blamed the paucity of positive cultural attitudes to human rights on the popular press, accusing journalists of portraying the Act as a ‘villains’ charter’ which disproportionately benefits those who are the least deserving of human rights protection. This paper examines what is behind the media hostility to the HRA. It identifies a number of factors which range from the press’s self-interest in resisting expanding privacy laws directly attributable to the HRA to a deep-seated cultural scepticism to human rights which finds its origins in a sense of national identity founded on a nostalgic longing for ancient civil liberties.

3.30-3.55 Refreshments

4.00-4.45 Closing address by Prof Graham Murdock, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University.

Title: Fear and Loathing in Cleveland: The Prehistory of Deviancy Amplification.

In their 1973 collection, The Manufacture of News, Stan Cohen and Jock Young set out to take stock of work in what was then the emerging field of deviancy and media. Thinking around amplification and moral panics was well represented in chapters summarising their own seminal research on the media coverage of Mods and Rockers and drug takers, now often presented as the point of origin for work in this area. One of the older pieces reprinted is James Davis’s 1952 article on crime news in Colorado newspapers, which highlighted the disjunction between crime rates and coverage and argued that the press created ‘crime waves’. The footnotes to this article contain a reference to an earlier study conducted in Prohibition Cleveland three decades earlier. This paper revisits this research and the model of amplification it developed and argues for its restoration to a central place in the history of debate around the linkages between tabloidization, amplification, and popular demands for tougher ‘law and order’ policies.

Report on Media & Cultural Studies @ NTU Symposium

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 21^st 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.       

Symposium: Media and Cultural Studies @ NTU: 21 years - the past, the present, the future

On Friday 8 February 2013, this year's annual Media and Cultural Studies Symposium takes place. This year's theme celebrates the 21st birthday of media and cultural studies at Nottingham Trent University by exploring the past, the present and the future of media and cultural studies.

While Nottingham Trent University has a 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 marks the 21^st birthday of the establishment of MCS as a Joint Honours subject in the institution. This was followed four years later (in 1996) by the setting up of a Media & Cultural Studies degree (now the BA in Media). Much has happened in the intervening years, both within the discipline, and within the higher education sector more broadly, both in the UK and beyond. The purpose of the symposium is to reflect on the changes, and continuities, within this period. What can we say about theoretical developments, pedagogical initiatives, new topics of enquiry and/or disappearing fields of study? The symposium will look to consider the history of Media & Cultural Studies, the contours of current debates and challenges, and the problems, issues and potentially new directions of the future.    

    

Some speakers are drawn from past  NTU staff and graduates who are now teaching at other UK universities. These include Professor Roger Bromley (University of Nottingham), Estella Tincknell (University of West of England), Donna Peberdy (Southampton Solent University) and Bob Jeffery (Sheffield Hallam University).However, we're really pleased to welcome Alexander Dhoest (University of Antwerp) who is also joining us as a speaker at the event alongside NTU staff Ben Taylor and Georgia Stone.

The day long event takes place on Clifton campus and is free of charge. To find out more about how to attend, please contact Dr Ben Taylor.

Queer/ing Regions Symposium: update

We now have a confirmed list of speakers for the 'Queer/ing Regions' Symposium. The event will take place on 7 February 2013, 10.30-17.00 on the Clifton campus (room CELS001) of Nottingham Trent University. The event is free: if you are interested in attending, please contact Dr Cuneyt Cakirlar or Dr Hongwei Bao.

The speakers are:

Camila Bassi (Sheffield Hallam)

Jon Binnie (Manchester Metropolitan)

Gavin Brown (Leicester)

Howard Chiang (Warwick)

Enda Mccaffrey (NTU)

Richard Phillips (Sheffield)

Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck)

William Spurlin (Brunel)

Bethan Stevens (NTU)

 
This research symposium aims to facilitate a critical intellectual exchange focusing on the discourses of the “regional” in contemporary queer criticism. Departing from the “transnational” turn in the second-wave queer scholarship exploring the global/ised intersections between race, ethnicity, nation/diaspora, gender and sexuality, we would like to address the possibilities/potentials of a critical “self-regioning” and thus to question the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges as objects of theoretical inquiry once situated within a global context by means of the critical, academic and activist practice.

We would like to revisit the critical potentials of reclaiming the regional in queer critique. Rather than presuming the regional actors as passive recipients of global flux, this conversation will be delving into the complex dynamics of the global/local binary in sexual politics. How can we understand transnational formations of sexual subjectivities without assuming a radical alterity between the local and the global, or the west and the east? How can we understand the uneasy nexus of community and sexuality in a global framework? How can we identify modes of negotiation and contestation in the encounter of the local sexual politics and practices with the Gay International?