Morrissey once sang "There's more to life than books, you know / but not much more..." ---
In an attempt to investigate this provocative hypothesis, I give you the unofficial blog for PGRs in the School of Arts and Media, University of Salford, and beyond.
News / updates / images etc... please get in touch!
The Gothic is, quite simply, everywhere: from the record-breaking successes of the Twilight vampire films and the TV series The Walking Dead,to the critically acclaimed videogames Left for Dead and Dead Space.
Its ubiquity is nothing new. Since its first wave of success in the
late eighteenth century, the Gothic has proved to be a truly
chameleonic artistic mode, consistently adapting itself to suit the
tastes of contemporary audiences whilst simultaneously projecting their
innermost anxieties. In the virtual and digital age, the Gothic has
proliferated in places where it had not traditionally found a home.
What challenges does a new array of media bring to the study of the
Gothic? And more importantly, why are we still hungry for zombies,
vampires, ghouls and other things that go bump in the night?
The Contemporary Gothic strand attempts to answer these questions
through a series of papers by distinguished academics in the vibrant
field of Gothic Studies. Through various critical lenses, and in a
thoroughly interdisciplinary spirit, these sessions will explore what
lies at the heart of our continuing fascination with all things dark.
Focusing on the recent resurgence of zombies, the explosion of the
Gothic on TV, and the scholarly-neglected area of Gothic music, these
papers will help us understand exactly what it is that new Gothic texts
may have to tell us about ourselves and the society we live in.
Wednesday 13th November 2013 and Tuesday 17th December 2013
University of Salford
Deadline for Applications: 15 August 2013
We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting proposals from
individuals working on any aspect of contemporary literature
(post-1916) for our AHRC funded two-day, interactive training event
entitled #postC20literaryresearch: Digital Engagement in Theory and
Practice. Across these two days participants will be given full
training and supported in producing a digital engagement output in the
form of a podcast.
The event is scheduled for Wednesday 13th November
and Tuesday 17th December and applicants must be available to attend
both days.
Further details about the project and this event can be found on our
website www.thec21scholar.com. There are a limited number of places and
all applications will be judged based on the quality of the proposed
podcasts.
2. Tuesday 22 October
Professor Ella Shohat (Professor of Art and Public Policy, Middle Eastern Studies, NYU)
Public Lecture: ‘The Sephardic-Moorish Atlantic’
Masterclass: Wednesday 23rd October http://meis.as.nyu.edu/object/ella.shohat
3. Tuesday 5 November
Professor Li Wei (Linguistics, Birkbeck)
Public Lecture on migration, diaspora and trans-languaging practices
(title and masterclass tbc) http://www.bbk.ac.uk/linguistics/our-staff/li-wei
Visitors to the free event can relive the glory days of programming Commodore 64s or ZX Spectrums and can play some old-school computer games. Coming bang up to date, they can also see how the Raspberry Pi is helping teach a new generation of children how to write computer programmes.
Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music is about to be published by Bloomsbury, co-edited by Salford academics Drs Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman.
The book arises from the international conference held at Salford in Summer 2010, “Bigger
than Words, Wider than Pictures: Noise, Affect, Politics”, and is the sister volume to Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (published in 2012 by Bloomsbury-Continuum, co-edited by Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan and Paul Hegarty).
Authors include Salford Profs Sheila Whiteley ("Kick Out the Jams! Creative Anarchy and Noise in 1960s Rock") and George McKay ("To Be Played at Maximum Volume: Rock Music as a Disabling (Deafening) Culture") along and an international cast of academics, musicians, programmers and photographers.
Contemporary histories of popular Western musics may be more usefully read as a series of debates concerning what, sonically and experientially, actually constitutes music in the commonly understood way, and what then constitutes, or can be termed as, and typically dismissed as, non-music. Such debates are class-ridden, evidence racial prejudices and profiling, continually undermine traditional musicological assumptions, radically problematize the commercial framings of music, mark all pivotal shifts in music across at least one hundred years, relentlessly advance the ‘death of the author’, are called upon to define time, place and national identity, and outmanoeuvre demarcations of high art and low culture. Answers provided have formed the methodological foundations of the conservatoire as well as journalistic and academic approaches to music, and now pull in their wake a judicial apparatus of ownership, censorship and reparations.
Technologies have been calibrated to answers provided too: reproductions of sound that invariably brag about ‘noise reduction’. Noise, to music, is typically byproduct, accident, the unwanted, the unpleasant. And yet noise is inevitable and imminent to music: that inexorable presence that mixers and sound engineers do their best to exorcize, that gig-goers reflexively block out, plugging fingers in ears, when it takes the form of feedback. The exception that proves the rule in terms of contemporary music is folk: ‘natural’ sounds and pre-modern instruments (and, often, affectations) as a respite from the noise of the real or urban world and the noise of the musics that the real or urban world taints – a kind of bucolic, aristocratic asceticism, and one that implicitly casts noise as detrimental to musical, and human, interactions.
This conference is aimed at: activists; academics; activist lawyers; students; interested professionals; the Crown Prosecution Service and Police officers. We particularly welcome any women working within women’s services and everyone who wants to make a difference to women’s lived experience of surviving violence.
The conference aims to: raise our consciousness; challenge our practice and galvanize feminist activism. We aim to create space for the exchange of ideas where we can rethink liberal certainties and (re-)politicise women’s services.
The conference will include provision of women-only workshops and space. The programme will consist of facilitated discussions as well as more formal academic addresses.
A New Network for Creatives Come along to the first meeting and help shape Salford's new creative network
Wednesday 3rd July 2013 5:30pm - 7:30pm Salford Museum and Art Gallery Peel Park, Salford M5 4WU
Bringing creatives and active communities together in Salford
Bringing people together for creative conversations across all artforms. Promoting arts activities and showcasing local talent. Sharing and extending arts knowledge, skill and aspirations. Developing collaborative work and projects.
Guest speakers: Alex Fenton is from Creative Hive, a free to use and advert free way for anyone to blog or set up a showcase of their work www.creativehive.org.
Susi Wrenshaw specialises in site-specific cutting edge productions and creating new adventures in unusual spaces www.happystormtheatre.co.uk.
Tell us you're coming. RSVP on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/491358887601633/?context=create Or email Allison.Stott@SCLL.co.uk
Sheffield Hallam University -Department of Humanities
Faculty of Development and Society
Fixed-term for 3 years
Salary £13,726 per annum
Applications
are invited for a PhD studentship in the area of Stage and Screen,
which is housed within the Department of Humanities. The studentship is
for three years, subject to satisfactory progress, and will include
full UK/EU tuition fees and a stipend of £13,726, per annum. Bursary
holders will be expected to contribute to the resourcing of the student
experience during their second and third years of study, either through
seminar teaching or some other form of student support.
The start date for the studentships is 1 October 2013.
As
a minimum, applicants should possess a 1st or 2.1 Honours degree, but
preference may be given to those with a distinction at M level.
We
welcome applications from students wishing to work in the areas of
contemporary British theatre and the processes of playwriting; East
Asian and transnational cinema; film history and criticism; or
adaptation studies.
Application
forms are available from http://www.shu.ac.uk/study/form.html or
through
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AGT948/graduate-school-phd-studentships/
At the top of the form please write 'studentship application' and return to
Graduate School Team, Sheffield Hallam University, Unit 9, Science Park, City Campus, Sheffield S1 1WB or email to fdresearch@shu.ac.uk
Please
note, at this stage, you only need to include the names and contact
details for referees and do not have to request references.
Non-EU Nationals please note We welcome applications from non-EEA applicants. However, we have a
legal responsibility to ensure that all employees are entitled to live
and work in the UK. Before applying please check whether you would be
eligible to work in the UK under the points-based system by using the UKBA points-based calculator. For further information please visit the
UK Border Agency website. If you
will need a Tier 2 Certificate of Sponsorship, contact us before
applying to check whether we should be able to issue one if you’re
appointed.
The Arena Concert: Music, Mediation and Mass Entertainment
The idea of live popular
music as mass entertainment is one that presents an arresting series of
challenges and remains mostly unexplored in contemporary academic writing. And
yet, it would seem, arena concerts are coming to constitute the commercial
future of popular music, and popular music is being shaped by this phenomena.
We ask: what, then, is this phenomena? And what then are the challenges that
have blocked a critical engagement with this phenomena?
Challenges to critical
engagement would seem to arise, firstly, along class lines: the event is truly
proletarian (at a time when the “alternative” of music festivals are
increasingly, at times preposterously, bourgeois). Secondly, along
technological lines: musicologists often seem ill at ease when dealing with new
paradigms of mediation, although performance, liveness, authenticity and
intimacy are all now reinvented through these vectors. Thirdly, along
experiential lines: the event can be wearying as much as entertaining. At its
miserable worst, and replicating the existence of battery hens for the fleeced
gig-goers, the arena concert is the eminently avoidable for denizens of
well-PA’d concert halls. Fourthly, in terms of traditional concepts of pop: the
event has little or no “present”, so that nostalgia tours and reunions jostle
with karaoke X-Factor contestants, stars negotiate between “keeping it real”
and hard selling their celebrity, and the “live album” of that night is somehow
also available to buy on that night. And, fifthly, in terms of celebrity:
hysterical mass gatherings around sole focal points are always a matter for
suspicion, and the traditionally oppositional nature of pop music is one that
auto-engenders a distaste for such totalitarian-style mass entertainments, and
its concomitant total consumer environment, on the part of its interpreters.
The post-digital landscape of
popular music consumption is one in which, paradoxically, “liveness”, the
experience, and authenticity have been returned to their prime positions -
perhaps for the first time since their folk (Newport) and rock (Woodstock) heydays.
The failures to secure “the product” across the 2000s (via anti-piracy software
and corporate malware, judicial attacks on Napster and Pirate Bay, the locking
of hardware, and reimagining questions of ownership) have rapidly led to albums
being reduced to little more than giveaway promotional fodder. And popular
music, post-MTV, is no longer an audio form: a nexus of image and news,
celebrity and fandom, seeking to saturate all digital platforms, comes to
constitute what is both popular and what is considered to be music. For bands
and artists, managers (and even medics) are replaced by tour organisers. For
young fans, the gig becomes the only complete way of buying into the music, and
the experience of attending the gig is authenticated (and propagated) via
social media, with the night itself commemorated via DVDs of the event (of a
new subgenre of the arena concert film). For not so young fans, a plethora of
artists of yesteryear are suddenly available, and live, and live, once again: a
post-MP3 reformation.
The arena concert becomes the
“real time” centre of a global digital network, and the gig-goer pays not only
for an immersion in (and, indeed, role in) its spectacular nature, but also for
a close encounter with the performers, in the contained space. This spectacular
nature raises challenges that have yet to be fully technologically overcome,
and has given rise to the reinvention of what the live concert actually means.
One thinks of the autobiographical narratives that come into play, so that the
gig is not just album-centred but life-centred (Alicia Keys revisiting the
music of her childhood, Kylie Minogue reminiscing about illness and past gigs
in the same cities), and not just a performance to attend, but a self-affirming
event (Lady Gaga’s talk of her global constituency). The enormous canvas
requires more - a “total” art. Hence the integration of the tropes and designs
of the fashion show, the circus, theatre and dance, ritual and religion, the
political rally and immersive video-gaming, which are offset by the ways in
which (via giant video screens) intimate and often acoustic moments are
achieved and shared (as with Keane and Coldplay). In this respect the arena
concert has come to compete with outdoor gigs in stadia and at festivals in
terms of remaking the live popular music experience for contemporary times,
raising the stakes for festival headline acts to be ever bigger and starrier
(as with U2, Radiohead and Beyonce).
This proposed volume will be
the first such exploration of the arena concert. It will test and define,
intervene and assess, offer pre-histories, present histories and consider
future directions, and will concern itself with designers, choreographers,
mixers, musicians and bands, promoters, security, broadcasters, caterers,
social media use and audiences. We invite proposals for academic chapters,
interventions, interviews and more, and have secured informal interest from a
major academic publisher. Proposals should be 400-500 words and emailed as a
Word file (not a PDF) with minimal formatting, and with a biographical note and
contact details included, to Benjamin Halligan (b.halligan@salford.ac.uk) by 23
July 2013. Informal inquiries prior very welcome.
The editorial team is:
Dr Robert Edgar, York St John University (The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to
Electropop, Basics Film-Making volumes)
Dr Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, University
of Salford (The Music Documentary)
Dr Benjamin Halligan, University of
Salford (Michael Reeves, Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Reverberations,
Resonances, The Music Documentary)
Dr Sunil Manghani, Winchester School of
Art (Image Studies: Theory and Practice, Images: A Reader, Image Critique and
the Fall of the Berlin Wall).
Death and Decay
This call for papers invites submissions on the subject of ‘Death and
Decay’ for the third edition of HARTS & Minds, an online postgraduate
journal for students of the Humanities and Arts, which is due to be
published online in Winter 2013-14.
Our first edition and further information can be found at www.harts-minds.co.uk and you can get updates on our journal at www.facebook.com/hartsandminds.
Submissions should adhere to the guidelines available on our website.
You can either send us an abstract (approximately 300 words in length)
and a completed article (no longer than 6000 words) OR you may provide
an abstract (300 words) and a synopsis outlining the structure and
argument of your intended article (approximately 1500-2000 words).
You must use the article template available on our website to format
your article. All submissions should be sent with an academic CV to
editors@harts-minds.co.uk by Friday 4th October.
We will also consider Creative Writing pieces (poetry or short stories
of up to 6,000 words) please email for more details.
Subjects may include but are not limited to the following:
- Elegy, Obituary, the Funeral March, laments, Eulogy
- Medical Humanities (e.g. Parasites, disease, autopsy, the cadaver)
- Rituals and rites of the dead in various cultures
- Burial practices
- Death and dying in literatures
- Visual Death; in art, photography, illustration, in film and
television, on stage
- Death personified: the Grim Reaper, Yama & Lord of Naraka, Hel, Hades
etc.
- The geography of death; real or mythological
- Decay if buildings, bodies, nature, morals
- The undead, reincarnation, immortality
- The death of discourse, language, the author, God
- Death as taboo
- War and death
- The future of death in a posthuman world.
- Moral death
- Death: presence and absence
- Afterlife, textual afterlives.
- Hauntings, the undead, vampires, zombies.
- Eschatology
- The value of Death: what makes a justified or honourable death?
- Dirt and debris, Wrecks and ruins, Flotsam and Jetsam
- Monuments, Memorials and the Archive
- Suicide, both literal and metaphorical.
Please consider that HARTS & Minds is intended as a truly
inter-disciplinary journal and therefore esoteric topics will need to be
written with a general academic readership in mind.
Our thanks to Nina Power for her fantastic talk yesterday... the feminisation of rebellion, the media's moral narratives of protests and riots, cultures of surveillance and panda masks, the privatisation of public spaces...
That concludes our Graduate Programme for this academic year. The new programme will be announced in September / October, and October will also see a substantial PGR event at MediaCity too.
This paper examines the framework in which the media - both putatively "left" and "right" - construct an examine of protest and perpetuate the myth of the "good" and the "bad" protester. It looks at the ways in which terms like "violence" are used by the media in a general way that nevertheless invokes both fear and permits the state to construct the context in which individuals receive lengthy jail sentences in court. It also looks at the way in which gender is invoked in images of protest (e.g. the Daily Mail's "Rage of the Girl Rioters" article during the student protests of late 2010). It argues that the media is complicit in a structure that seeks to uphold the existing order and pre-emptively criminalise protesters in much the same way as the state does. Sources will include: newspapers, tv footage, court reports and the police protester database.
Dr Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the co-editor of Alain Badiou's On Beckett (Clinamen), and the author of several articles on European Philosophy, atomism, pedagogy, art and politics. Nina has a wide range of interests, including philosophy, film, art, feminism and politics.
She is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0, 2009) and is interested in independent publishing and
reviving certain political forms and genres of writing. Some of the publications she regularly contributes to include frieze, Wire, Radical Philosophy, the Guardian, Cabinet, Film Quarterly, Icon, The Philosophers’ Magazine. Nina is currently working on two book-length projects – one on the topic of work and the other on the history of the collective political subject. She is also working on a number of more experimental collaborations with artists and writers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nina-power
Full time Postgraduate Research Student Bursaries (at least two available) start date - October 2013
Each studentship will have a bursary of £13,726 per annum (pro-rata as a monthly payment) plus UK/EU Fees paid for a period of three years.
If you are an enthusiastic high achieving
student looking to undertake a PhD in a vibrant research environment,
then join us by applying for a full time bursary. The successful
applicants will undertake their research in our new Centre for Applied
Social Research (CeASR) working within Research Theme 3: ‘Sex, Gender, Identity, Power and Risk’
PhD Studentship
applications are particularly welcome from students aiming to conduct
research that examines aims/research questions that fall within the
areas of
social science research and within the themes of sex. gender, power, identity and risk.
We are also interested in proposals that examine/explore the
exploitation, marginalization, victimization and potential
empowerment/risk reduction. Lastly, we would also be interested in
applications that have a focus on the intersections of gender, culture,
social class and race.
To discuss any ideas further please contact ‘Sex, Gender, Identity, Power and Risk’theme leaders Dr. Bridgette Rickett (b.rickett@leedsmet.ac.uk) and Dr. Sarah Kingston (S.Kingston@leedmet.ac.uk)
Cazz Blaise - Worlds within worlds: punk ladies, riot grrrls and fanzine culture
Wednesday 29 May 2pm
This talk will discuss the role women played in the UK punk scene and
the UK incarnation of the female focused, female dominated riot grrrl
scene.
Chris Burgess -
Bridging the Irwell
Wednesday 12 June 2pm
Chris's talk will highlight how the Unlocking Ideas project is making
links between the Library and the People's History Museum. Results will
be on display - from possible new Peterloo evidence to "horse burgers"
in 1857.
Natalie Bradbury - Woman's Outlook: a surprisingly modern magazine?
Wednesday 26 June 2pm
For nearly five decades from its origins in Manchester in 1919, Woman's
Outlook was the voice of the Co-operative Women's Guild, the
campaigning organisation which worked to raise the status of women both
in the co-operative movement and in society. The talk will look at how
the magazine encouraged women to get involved in campaigning for a
better world.
Neil Dymond-Green -
Invisible Histories - keeping the memories alive
Wednesday 10 July 2pm
WCML's Invisible Histories project has collected fascinating memories
of three Salford workplaces. Now hear how we're keeping these stories
alive by working with local high school students to create new Radio
Ballads in the tradition of Ewan MacColl.
2. On Sunday 9 June at 3pm there is a benefit gig
at Islington Mill
in aid of the Library. Will Kaufman, who put on a bravura performance
for us last year, has kindly agreed to do another show for us, covering
a different aspect of Guthrie's life and work - "All you Jim Crow fascists!" - Woody Guthrie's freedom songs. Conventionally known for his championing of the poor white Dust Bowl migrants, Guthrie also left an extensive
body of songs condemning Jim Crow segregation, lynching and race hatred.
All
who were there for Will's last show agreed that it was a terrific tour
de force - this event features completely different material so please
come along and support the Library while enjoying Will's informative
and entertaining style of ‘live documentary' presentation.
Islington Mill, James Street, Salford M3 5HW. Tickets on the door £10.
3. Our next free Library tour is on Wednesday 5 June 2pm - email
enquiries@wcml.org.uk if you'd like to book. The tour takes about an hour.
4.
Manchester Sound: The Massacre
is the finale to the Library Theatre Company's programme of
site-specific theatre experiences. This summer's production, at a
yet-to-be-announced central Manchester location, aims to bring the
changing face of protest in our radical city vividly to life - melding
the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the illegal rave parties of the late
80s acid house scene.
In
an underground club in Manchester, two groups of idealists meet. Both
are looking for utopia, or, at the very least, something like euphoria.
Both are being hounded by the law. And both are hoping for the night of
their lives. They just happen to come from different centuries...
The production runs from Saturday 8 June to Saturday 6 July. More information at
http://bit.ly/X75DxU
5. Anyone who missed
Owen Jones's packed-out Frow Lecture earlier in the month can now hear an audio recording of it via a link on our home page at
www.wcml.org.uk. It's a large download so if you have any problem making it work you're welcome to come into the Library and listen to it here.
Location: Room 2.20, MediaCityUK (Salford Uni building)
Internal Speaker: Professor Ben Light (3.3.55pm)
Appropriation, Participation and the Creation of Celebrity: Introducing Internet-Mediated Urban Eccentrics
This work,
undertaken in conduction with Helen Keegan (University of Salford)
concerns the potential, and processes of, the internet-mediated
construction and communication of urban eccentrics; ‘local characters’
who have traditionally been known to unconnected groups within a
geographic locale. Our work suggests that the internet has the
potential to connect these groups and generate notoriety for urban
eccentrics, transcending time and space. Despite literatures around
online fandom (Baym 2002) and micro-celebrity (Senft, 2008) it appears
that the relationships between digital media and urban eccentrics have
received very little academic attention. Our research is based on a
discourse analysis of the Facebook fan page associated with a
particular urban eccentric and other artifacts connected with them and
shared throughout the Internet. Drawing
upon Monaco’s (1978) concept of the Quasar, a category of celebrity, we
undertake a reading of an urban eccentric: the Market Street Mincer
(MSM) someone known for walking around Market Street in Manchester, UK
during 2001-2003. Monaco defines the Quasar by their unwillingness to
‘be’ a celebrity, that fact they have little control over their status
and that our interest is due to what we believe they are. In our case,
the MSM operates as an enigma, no-one knows for certain why he does
what he does and the extent to which he is willing to become a
celebrity and under what terms. For example, several Facebook posts
state that he walked to be spotted by a scout for a modelling agency.
If that is the case, the attention he has received is something very
different from that which he set out to gain. Thus, we need to think
about the concept of the Quasar, and their abilities to influence their
identities in the light of user generated content.
Guest Speaker: Beth Johnson (Keele University) (4-4.55pm)
Shameless: Situating
Sex Beyond the City
This paper explores how the unashamed representations of the sexual desires of four female characters in
Shameless (Channel 4, 2004 - present), namely Monica Gallagher
(Annabelle Apsion), Fiona Gallagher (Anne-Marie Duff), Shelia Jackson
(Maggie O'Neil) and Karen Jackson (Rebecca Atkinson), are connected to
and cartographized through the fringe spaces of the Chatsworth estate.
Contemplating the ways in which the UK series moves away from high-end
US visions of slick surfaces, spaces and bodies, found, for example, in
series such as
Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004), the paper analyses the
social positions, dominant sexual desires and complex narrative
functions of these women, arguing that in the series, female desire is
unashamedly repositioned at the centre rather than at the peripheries
of the narrative.
Dr. Beth Johnson is a lecturer in Television and Film Studies at Keele University, UK. She is the author of various
extant publications in journals such as Angelaki and The Journal of Cultural Research
and her recent book chapters include ‘Realism, Real Sex and the
Experimental Film: Mediating New Erotics in Georges Bataille’s Story of
the Eye’ in Realism
and the Audiovisual Media (Palgrave Press: 2009, 135-151), and ‘Sex, Psychoanalysis and Sublimation in Dexter’ in Investigating Dexter: Cutting Edge Television (I.B.Tauris: 2010, 78-95). Beth’s forthcoming publications include a monograph on British
television auteur ‘Paul Abbott’ for The Television Series (Manchester University Press, forthcoming, 2013) and a co-authored book entitled
Exploring the Carnographic: Sex, Violence and Extremism in Global Culture to be published byPalgrave Macmillan in 2014. Beth has recently co-edited a new collection entitled
Television, Sex and Society: Analyzing Contemporary Representations (Continuum Press, August 2012).
The Gothic is, quite simply, everywhere: from the record-breaking successes of the Twilight vampire films and the TV series The Walking Dead, to the critically acclaimed videogames Left for Dead and Dead Space.
Its ubiquity is nothing new. Since its first wave of success in the
late eighteenth century, the Gothic has proved to be a truly
chameleonic artistic mode, consistently adapting itself to suit the
tastes of contemporary audiences whilst simultaneously projecting their
innermost anxieties. In the virtual and digital age, the Gothic has
proliferated in places where it had not traditionally found a home.
What challenges does a new array of media bring to the study of the
Gothic? And more importantly, why are we still hungry for zombies,
vampires, ghouls and other things that go bump in the night? 
Challenges to critical
engagement would seem to arise, firstly, along class lines: the event is truly
proletarian (at a time when the “alternative” of music festivals are
increasingly, at times preposterously, bourgeois). Secondly, along
technological lines: musicologists often seem ill at ease when dealing with new
paradigms of mediation, although performance, liveness, authenticity and
intimacy are all now reinvented through these vectors. Thirdly, along
experiential lines: the event can be wearying as much as entertaining. At its
miserable worst, and replicating the existence of battery hens for the fleeced
gig-goers, the arena concert is the eminently avoidable for denizens of
well-PA’d concert halls. Fourthly, in terms of traditional concepts of pop: the
event has little or no “present”, so that nostalgia tours and reunions jostle
with karaoke X-Factor contestants, stars negotiate between “keeping it real”
and hard selling their celebrity, and the “live album” of that night is somehow
also available to buy on that night. And, fifthly, in terms of celebrity:
hysterical mass gatherings around sole focal points are always a matter for
suspicion, and the traditionally oppositional nature of pop music is one that
auto-engenders a distaste for such totalitarian-style mass entertainments, and
its concomitant total consumer environment, on the part of its interpreters.
The arena concert becomes the
“real time” centre of a global digital network, and the gig-goer pays not only
for an immersion in (and, indeed, role in) its spectacular nature, but also for
a close encounter with the performers, in the contained space. This spectacular
nature raises challenges that have yet to be fully technologically overcome,
and has given rise to the reinvention of what the live concert actually means.
One thinks of the autobiographical narratives that come into play, so that the
gig is not just album-centred but life-centred (Alicia Keys revisiting the
music of her childhood, Kylie Minogue reminiscing about illness and past gigs
in the same cities), and not just a performance to attend, but a self-affirming
event (Lady Gaga’s talk of her global constituency). The enormous canvas
requires more - a “total” art. Hence the integration of the tropes and designs
of the fashion show, the circus, theatre and dance, ritual and religion, the
political rally and immersive video-gaming, which are offset by the ways in
which (via giant video screens) intimate and often acoustic moments are
achieved and shared (as with Keane and Coldplay). In this respect the arena
concert has come to compete with outdoor gigs in stadia and at festivals in
terms of remaking the live popular music experience for contemporary times,
raising the stakes for festival headline acts to be ever bigger and starrier
(as with U2, Radiohead and Beyonce).
Death and Decay
Internal Speaker: Professor Ben Light (3.3.55pm) 
This paper explores how the unashamed representations of the sexual desires of four female characters in
Shameless (Channel 4, 2004 - present), namely Monica Gallagher
(Annabelle Apsion), Fiona Gallagher (Anne-Marie Duff), Shelia Jackson
(Maggie O'Neil) and Karen Jackson (Rebecca Atkinson), are connected to
and cartographized through the fringe spaces of the Chatsworth estate.
Contemplating the ways in which the UK series moves away from high-end
US visions of slick surfaces, spaces and bodies, found, for example, in
series such as
Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004), the paper analyses the
social positions, dominant sexual desires and complex narrative
functions of these women, arguing that in the series, female desire is
unashamedly repositioned at the centre rather than at the peripheries
of the narrative.