MMP Grad Prog this Weds: KATE and WILLIAM... URBAN SPACE in ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC

Wednesday 21 November:

3.10 – 4pm: MediaCityUK (University of Salford campus), Room 3.02

Internal session: Dr Benjamin Halligan (University of Salford; CASS)

Establishing Establishment Art: Mario Testino presents William and Kate

How is the history and ontology of the “English establishment” preserved and maintained in postmodern times? This presentation of current research examines Mario Testino’s official wedding photograph of Kate Middleton and William Wales from 2011. Using semiotic and poststructuralist analysis, this talk will seek to identify in what ways is the establishment is both called into creation, and called to account, in this image.

4.10 – 5pm: MediaCityUK (University of Salford campus), Room 3.02

Guest Speaker: Hillegonda Rietveld (London South Bank University)

Listening to Urban Space in Electronic Dance Music

With reference to ideas in sonic, film and cultural studies (such as LaBelle, Brophy, Donald and de Certeau) this paper argues that the sound of EDM enacts a sense of urban alienation, austerity and acceleration. For example, A Guy Called Gerald's Voodoo Ray (1988) seems to echo Manchester's 1980s post-industrial landscape, while the dubstep work of Burial, like Distant Lights (2006) crackles with digital malfunction, wrapped in deep growling sub-bass and placed in a hollow acoustic space that seems to resemble a deserted South London council estate at 3am.  The paper hereby suggest that we must listen to recorded popular music as an “architecsonic” object that is part of a sonic ecology and analyse the full soundscape of a recording, rather than merely focus on a memorable melody line or on a set of significant lyrics. In this context, EDM seems to act as a subconscious “cinematic” underscore that articulates issues of affect in urban experience.

Dr Hillegonda Rietveld is Reader at London South Bank University, where she established BA Music and Sonic Media, and she is Editor of IASPM@Journal. Her publications address the development and experience of electronic dance music cultures and she is the author of This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies. She has been involved professionally in club and DJ culture since 1982, when she released her first electronic recording for Factory Records, as part of Quando Quango.

(Anyone who needs to sign in: you’ll be met at reception at 3 and 4, prior to each talk).

Our thanks to Brilliant

Our thanks to Brilliant (left) and host Everette N'dlovu (right) for Wednesday's session: local radio in South Africa, articulating historical trauma, cultures of dialogue, the ANC and peoples' history, old technology versus new....

As Yet Impossible talk, MediaCity 13/11

This free series, bringing enlightened thinkers to challenge us to take part in shaping our own futures, continues on November 13th at our Media City campus.


Time 6-8 pm (Refreshments from 5.30 pm) Location Digital Performance Lab.


To book your free ticket

http://asyetimpossible-michaeljoroff.eventbrite.com   


More information

Dr. Tim May from SURF will host MIT’s Mike Joroff who will talk about 'inventional' parts of our cities. He will invite us to imagine future cities where citizens shape their own experience, delight themselves, learn and build community, and how scientists and artists can transparently enable such creativity through working in partnership with one another.


Mike Joroff is an expert in Media Cities and was one of the lead consultants on MediaCityUK. He is an urban planning expert and a consultant on urban development projects in the USA, South Korea, Japan, Britain, Sweden, and Abu Dhabi. He is also sought after as an adviser on property development strategy and the design of workplaces.


He teaches globally about the impact of new business models and emerging technology on the design of corporate workplaces and large-scale property developments. He offers insights into groundbreaking work in the fields of energy management, environmental policy, urban design, housing technology and the management of corporate property. A futurist and pioneer of the ‘Think, Play, Do’ methods of maximising creative potential in the workplace, he will challenge us to take control of our own cities of the future.

Admission to the lecture is free. To register, go to http://asyetimpossible-michaeljoroff.eventbrite.com

Salford's Dr Moore -- new book published!

New paperback:
Phoebe Moore, Globalisation and Labour Struggle in Asia: A Neo-Gramscian Critique of South Korea’s Political Economy (I.B. Tauris, 30 October 2012).




http://hub.salford.ac.uk/phoebemoore/2012/11/07/my-new-paperback/
Endorsements:
‘Phoebe Moore makes a fresh and important contribution to the study of global political economic struggles, deploying an analysis of South Korean labour in relation to capitalist development and globalisation, hegemony and passive revolution. This is agency-centred critical International Political Economy at its best, addressing one of the great labour struggles of our time’ Barry Gills, Professor of Global Politics, Newcastle University.

‘In this empirically rich and conceptually innovative book, Phoebe Moore convincingly demonstrates that neo-liberal restructuring in South Korea had not been a hegemonic process, but was constantly contested by workers shaping the outcome. I strongly recommend this book to everyone interested in neo-liberal globalisation and the possibilities of resistance to it’ Andreas Bieler, Professor of Political Economy, University of Nottingham.

‘Phoebe Moore has produced a rich and engaging study of South Korean political economy, which deserves to be read widely. It acts as a useful stimulus towards continued exploration of the social relations and political struggles which underpin and shape contemporary development processes’ Nicola Phillips, Professor in Political Economy, University of Sheffield.

Phoebe, speaking at our MediaCityUK Postgraduate Conference, this Summer:

Symposium: Transnational Mediations

IHSSR and the Department of Languages and InfoComms, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Symposium: Transnational Mediations: Nation(al-ism), Culture and Identity Politics.

November 16 , 11-14.

GM 337

Free event

This symposium aims to bring together scholars specialised in media and communication studies, who work interdisciplinarily across literature, journalism, discourse analysis, politics, PR and sociology to discuss the role the media plays in Europe and the United States in the 21st century. Although this idea may seem obvious at first glance, this reflection raises other questions that are less tangible when considering issues of race, class, gender, language and geopolitics as defining constituents of a sense of belonging, of “self” against “other(s)”, of entitlement, rights and privilege. In this respect, the different guest speakers will analyse how the media and communication sector, challenges, establishes, settles and negotiates hegemonic social orders, while simultaneously opening up spaces for political action and intervention that destabilises, in higher or lesser degrees, notions of nationhood, citizenship and justice, among others. It also problematises the fact that glocal realities are broadcasted and “reported” within a globalising information society.


Prof. Federico Subervi, Texas State University-San Marcos. "The Media Do Make a Difference: New Directions in the Study of Media and Latino Political Mobilization"
Dr. Xavier Giró, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. "Neocolonialism in the Discourse of Media: Nationalism and Migrations. Theoretical and Practical Aspects"
Dr. Joan Cuenca-Fontobna. Universitat Ramón Llull, Spain. "Let's talk about Gender? Presence and Absence in PR Discursive Practices and Strategies."
Dr. Klaus Zilles. Universitat Ramón Llull, Spain. "Performing Linguistic Identity and Integration: The Politics of Interpellation in the Catalonian Media"

For further information please contact: A.Wehbe@mmu.ac.uk

CIDRAL talks at Manchester Uni

Annual Theme 2012-13: Public Intellectuals

Main Events: Autumn Semester 2012

All lectures 5-7pm in John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Arts Centre. (unless stated otherwise)

Tuesday 13 November 

Full details of all talks via http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/cidra/events/index.htm

Open Lecture
Professor Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam/IKKM Weimar)
How to Create a Public Intellectual, Posthumously
5-7pm in John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Arts Centre.

According to Richard Posner, public intellectuals— eminent persons able to speak with authority to the public on the political and moral issues of the day – are in decline, pushed aside by pundits, opinionators or ideologically driven spin masters. Posner thinks this trend can be reversed, and maybe even reverse-engineered, using the very media that have undermined both quality control and trust, to service a need that clearly still exists.
My lecture is about a more modest quest: the circumstantially imposed obligation, but subsequently quite happily assumed opportunity to bring back from oblivion a member of my own family: neither prophet nor public intellectual, yet a voice in the wilderness nonetheless, barely heard between ideological extremes, considered by many not of his time, but may be therefore of ours. I shall focus on the sources and traces, the people and places that I encountered in my (most likely) failed attempt to re-invent a life with the means and media of today.

Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and from 2006 to 2012 was Visiting Professor at Yale University. He has authored, edited and co-edited some twenty volumes, many of which have been translated, notably into German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Korean and Chinese.  His most recent books as author are Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010, with Malte Hagener) and The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012).
This lecture is the closing event of the SALC launch programme. Followed by a wine reception.
Postgraduate Masterclass on WG Sebald
2-3.30pm in Roscoe Building, Brunswick Street, Room 3.5.
Thomas Elsaesser with respondents: Janet Wolff (Professor Emerita, EAC) and Dr Monica Pearl (EAC)
For details of the readings: http://db.tt/DPrsiw9x

All welcome!

Thursday 15 November

Dr Katherine O’Donnell (University College Dublin)
in conversation with Dr Eleanor Casella (Arch., SALC)
“Ireland's Magdalene Laundry System 1922-1996: Sin and the Public Sphere”Event starts at 6pm

Tuesday 27 November   

Dr Michael Mack (University of Durham)
“Revisiting the Two Cultures Debate: Affect, Economics and Science”

Grad Prog: talks this Weds (7/11): Re-imagining Articulation: Community Radio and the ‘Return of the Local’

4.10pm-5pm, Room 2.19, MediaCityUK. (Non-Salford students meet 4pm in reception to be signed in).

Guest Speaker: Brilliant Mhlanga

Re-imagining Articulation: Community Radio and the ‘Return of the Local’ 

The rise of community radio in Africa in general and, in particular, South Africa continues to be seen as part of the state’s developmental emancipatory project and part of democratisation. Community radio as the expression of a geographically localised community, with a manageable population, and a third developmental voice existing between the state, public and private commercial radio carries with it the features of; independence, equality, community participation and representation. Operating as the alternative element, community radio offers the dialogic potential of engaging and representing cultural distortions inherent in the majority-controlled media by offering the local communities an opportunity to broadcast their views and vision. Localised broadcasting and allowing communities to use their languages in a community radio station offers a major sketch of representation and conjures feelings of empowerment. XK FM, a radio station for the !Xu and Khwe communities of South Africa will be used as a case study. It will be argued that XK FM as a community radio represents the pre-eminence of value laden participatory approach, re-invigorating the theory of articulation and marks the return of the nativised local through the use of language as the logic of empowerment and as part of inter-state-community dialogue and inter-community forms of engagement.

Brilliant Mhlanga holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Mass Media and Communication, University of Hertfordshire, UK, and is also associated with the Africa Media Centre, University of Westminster (London), UK. He is also affiliated with the National University of Science & Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe, and is currently working on a number of topics, among them a book titled: Bondage of Boundaries & the ‘Toxic Other’ in Postcolonial Africa:  The Northern Problem & Identity Politics Today, and another project provisionally titled: On the Banality of Evil: Cultural Particularities & Genocide in Africa. Mhlanga is a recipient of a number of awards and fellowships; chief among them being; the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow (African Leadership Institute & University of Oxford), W. K. Kellogg Foundation Southern African Indigenous Research Fellowship and Distinguished Civil Society Fellow with the Global Network for Africa’s Prosperity (GNAP). His research interests include: media and development communication, community radio, ethnic minority media, ethnicity, nationalism and postcolonial studies, media policies & political economy of the media.

Grad Prog talk this Weds (31/10)

4pm-5pm, The Egg, MediaCityUK. (Non-Salford students meet 4pm in reception to be signed in). Drinks after!

Charlie Blake (editor of Angelaki) 


Sonic Spectralities: Music, Media and Fundamental Hauntography
From the angelic machinery of 14th century celestial harmonies, to the more demonic machinery of the industrial and post-industrial ages, music has borne a paradoxical relationship with technology, system and structure, on the one hand, and the supernatural, the irrational and the libidinal, on the other. This relationship, a constantly mutating metaphor, does, however, have a certain conceptual stability, in that the imaginal energies that enable creativity and its affective reception in the listener, the dancer, and the enchanted, require the order of instrument and instrumentation to emerge at all.

The libidinal power of music requires, demands even, the machinery of expression as the medium of its transmission, from imagination to imagination, from body to body. But however complex that relationship might have been in human development historically, the creation of recording technologies changes everything. From Edison onwards, two forms of spectrality at least start to emerge in recorded music. The first, represented by the Goethe scholar and Anthroposophist, Rudolf Steiner, envisions elementals of wood, metal and presumably shellac trapped in the industrial process, to the point where playing a record kills invisible entities in droves. The second form of spectrality concerns the creation of entities through the repetition of the lyric as it interacts with musical memory. In this paper, therefore, hauntography will be deployed in an attempt to map the spectralities of recorded music through this tension between the supernatural and the phenomenal.




Charlie Blake was Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural theory and Head of the Department of Media, Film and Communications at Liverpool Hope University. He is an executive editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and amongst other publications, has recently co-edited and written for the collections: Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism, Masochism and the Philosophical Muse (two volumes) and Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism. He is currently working on the politics of pornotheology, on immanence and materialism, and on the hauntography of music, and co-editing a collection with Nadine Boljkovac on Deleuze and Affect.

Barthes reading group

Message from Dr Sunil Manghani (who spoke on our Grad Prog a couple of years ago):

I am writing to let you know about a project I've just started which I hope might be of interest to you or colleagues and/or postgrads.

Building on the Neutral reading group in 2011, I have now turned attention to Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary. In the last few days I have begun a live(d) reading of the book using a Roland Barthes Facebook alias. In effect I'm inviting you to follow 'RB' on FB for an exploration of the Mourning Diary, which aims to slow the book down to its 'original' temporality and mode of writing (which is oddly akin to the status update of social media, albeit a fiercely private one). For fuller details of the project, see: http://neutrallife.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/mourning-diary/

To participate or simply to catch things (here and there) send a 'friend request' to 'Roland Barthes':
http://www.facebook.com/roland.barthes.73

The Manchester Hackathon - 17 November 2012

Coders, Hackers & Developers needed to shape the future of the city. 

For the first time ever, the City of Manchester invites you to dig underneath its digital skin. FutureEverything, Open Data Manchester and Manchester City Council are looking for experts and innovators to hack, code, programme and experiment with the city's sets of open data to build new applications and develop future services.

Utilising the open data sets from DataGM made available by Manchester City Council and public sector partners, participants are welcome to produce anything they wish - develop applications to help people find their way around, stay safe, discover new experiences and everything and anything in between. All data is released under the Open Government Licence.

Taking place at MadLab in the heart of Manchester's Northern Quarter on Saturday 17th November, the Manchester Hackathon is set to be an intense, productive and exciting collaboration between the brightest minds in software development and data processing. Entries from both teams and individuals are welcome, and there are cash prizes to be won for the best product at the end of the session, including;

 

• Grand Prize - £4,600*

• Best Under 21's Creation - £600

• Best Visualisation - £600

• Best Locative Application - £600

• Developer's Prize - £600

• Best Solution for an Identified Problem - £600

* £1000 prize & £3,600 development funding 

 

The prizes will be selected by a panel of independent industry experts, including Dave Carter (MDDA) and Lou Cordwell (magneticNorth).

 

The Hackathon takes place on Saturday 17th November 9am - 7pm, with a warmup and networking session beforehand at MDDA (Lower Ground Floor, 117-119 Portland St, Manchester, M1 6ED) on Friday 16th November 6.30 - 8.30pm.

 

The event is completely free to enter and open to all. Sign up here

Made in Manchester seminars

Made in Manchester is holding a series of seminars in the autumn and winter showcasing how an independent production company works.

The sessions are aimed at anyone who is interested in knowing more about independent production, its relationship with broadcasters and how to work with a company like MIM

Attendees will get the chance to hear how a programme is made, how the ideas process works and what you need to do to impress and get noticed by producers at a company like Made in Manchester. There will also be advice on the financial side of freelancing.

Please see this link for more information and how to book

http://www.madeinmanchester.tv/2012/10/28/book-now-for-special-mim-seminars/

Media City Masterclasses (30/10)

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The University of Salford and BBC Audio Drama North would like to invite you to:

Media City Masterclasses: BBC Audio Drama North

Digital Performance Lab, University of Salford, MediaCityUK

Tuesday October 30th at 5.15pm and 7.15pm

Please join us for the first event in this new series showcasing the work of the different organisations based at MediaCityUK.

At 5.15pm, there will be a special Halloween playback of BBC Audio Drama radio play Midnight Cry of the Deathbird, a drama inspired by the classic silent horror film Nosferatu.

At 7.15pm, BBC Audio Drama North Editor Sue Roberts will be joined by writer and Prix Italia nominee Amanda Dalton for a Media City Masterclass on writing for audio drama.

This is a free event and you are welcome to attend one or both events.

Places will be allocated on a first come first served basis so it is advisable to aim to arrive at the Digital Performance Lab 10 - 15 minutes before the event.