HUMAN SCIENCES SEMINAR: Manchester Metropolitan University

Programme Spring 2013

All meetings begin at 5 pm

Room 2.31
Geoffrey Manton Building
Rosamond St. West
Manchester
M15 6LL


24th Jan.             
Expressive Individualism, the Cult of the Artist as Genius and Milton’s Lucifer
Patrick Madigan, Heythrop College         

31st Jan.              
Lyotard’s Blues
Antony Hudek, Liverpool John Moores/Tate Liverpool

7th Feb.              
Teaching-Led Research: Heidegger and the Idea of the University
Mark Sinclair, MMU
                                               

28th Feb.            
Cosmopolitanism and the End of Humanity: A Grammatical Reading of Post-humanism
Véronique Pin-Fat, University of Manchester

7th Mar.              
Sartre on Knowing One’s Own Character
Jonathan Webber, University of Cardiff

14th Mar.           
Regret, Narrative and First Personal Thinking
Anna Bergqvist, MMU
                               

For further information contact:
Keith Crome, Manchester Metropolitan University Dept. of History, Politics and Philosophy, Geoffrey Manton Building Manchester, M15 6LL

k.crome@mmu.ac.uk

PhD funding opportunity: Anthony Burgess Foundation

Applications are invited for a PhD bursary, to support research into the literature or music of Anthony Burgess and his contemporaries. The bursary will support a scholar beginning his or her studies in the academic year 2013-14. The bursary is tenable anywhere in the world and offers up to £15,000 per annum for a maximum of three years.

Areas of research might include the literature or music of Anthony Burgess and his contemporaries, or a critical investigation into one of the areas in which Burgess published, e.g. dystopia, historical fiction, science fiction, Cold War fiction, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, literary journalism, literary biography, music and literature, or literary translation.

Applicants should submit a detailed proposal and two academic references (in English). To be eligible, applicants should already have been offered a place on an accredited university PhD programme.

For further information please write to director@anthonyburgess.org

The closing date for applications is 1 May 2013.

Back in January... Happy Christmas!

City Fun archive now online

Manchester District Music Archive's brand new online exhibition:
"City Fun - The Hidden History of Manchester's Post-Punk Fanzines"
went live over the weekend.

Included in the pages of 'City Fun' is an article credited to Burt
Macho which has now been established as the work of Morrissey; now
unmasked for the first time...

The 'City Fun' fanzine was published between 1978 and 1984 and is a
remarkable eye-witness account of one of the most fertile periods in
Manchester's music history; in its pages you get the unfolding
insider story of the rise of Joy Division, the death of Ian Curtis,
the beginnings of the Smiths, and the launch of the Hacienda plus a
unique insight into the city's independent labels, long-lost venues
and half-forgotten bands.

'City Fun' was one of many fanzines of the era; home-made, and
cheaply but passionately produced magazines aimed at lovers of
non-mainstream music, and sold by hand at gigs and in record shops.

Many contributors have since found fame, among them the artist Linder
Sterling. Researchers working on this 'City Fun' online archive have
also established that an article about Sandie Shaw by "Burt Macho"
was a contribution by none other than Morrissey.

Morrissey was a reader and a fan of 'City Fun' but he chose to write
in the fanzine under the pseudonym "Burt Macho".  It was just as the
Smiths were taking off; the same issue carries an advert for the
first Smiths single. John Peel said it was most important fanzine of
its time, and certainly nothing will give you greater insight into
the ideas and history of post-punk Manchester. It’s all in 'City Fun'.

The 'City Fun' online exhibition is part of Manchester Histories
Festival's ongoing celebration and investigation of Manchester's
fanzines. Festival Director Claire Turner; "This online exhibition
creates a permanent record of an era of alternative music in
Manchester that's now become internationally famous. The archive is a
source of information to historians and a source of inspiration for
subsequent generations."

The online exhibition of the 'City Fun' archive can be found here;

http://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/cityfun/

MMP Grad Prog (12/12): Research Resources / Stigma and Sex Work Research

Two talks this Weds ---- the first of interest to all PGRs in terms of resources available to you, and on what to expect when it comes to thesis submission time!

The second will be of particular use to those engaged in collecting field data, and those engaged in the study of "difficult" (controversial, contested) topics... as well as those thinking of working in research outside of academe.

Internal Speaker: 3.10 - 4pm, Room 3.02, MediaCity (Salford Campus)

External Speaker: 4.10 - 5pm, Room 3.02, MediaCity (Salford Campus)

(I'll be at reception to sign anyone in who isn't Salford PGR/staff at 3pm and 4pm)

Everyone welcome. Drinks after, as usual!

Wednesday 12 Dec

Internal speaker

Anne Sherwin (Salford)

Salford’s library resources for PGRs, and submission of theses

Anne works to support PGR research in terms of library resources; she’ll be discussing what’s on offer, and talking about new university arrangements in respect to thesis submission and electronic archiving.

External speaker:

Sarah Kingston (Leeds Metropolitan University):

Managing Stigma as a Sex Work Researcher

Literature has documented how researching sex work has been fraught with challenges, due to the stigma attached to its subject matter, the perceived dangerousness of participants, and the barriers faced in reaching hidden populations. By reflecting upon research experiences and drawing upon a body of reflexive sex work research, this paper explores how I experienced stigma not only in my professional role as a researcher, but also in my personal life. By applying Goffman’s (1968) notion of stigma by association; and considering how stigma often associated with prostitution became transposed onto me, I consider how I managed my “spoiled identity” and consider the implications for researching a stigmatised topic.

 

Dr Kingston’s research interests centre on the sex industry, youth and youth justice, sexuality and sexual consent, and employment law, and her PhD research explored the perceptions and impact of prostitution on residential and business communities. She is currently writing a monograph based on this research for Routledge, Prostitution in the Community: Attitudes, Action and Resistance. Dr Kingston is currently involved in research in conjunction with Brunel University and Middlesex University, which explores young people’s perceptions and attitudes towards religion. This research project is jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council Large Grants (Religion & Society) Scheme. It is a two-year project entitled “Negotiating Identity: young people's perspectives on faith values, community norm and social cohesion”, carried out in the Bradford/Keighley area, and the London Boroughs of Hillingdon and Newham. Recent publications include: “Intent to criminalize: Men who buy sex and prostitution policy in the UK”, New Sociologies of Sex work (Sanders, Kingston & Hardy, Ashgate, 2010) and “Demonising desire: Men who buy sex and prostitution policy in the UK”, Sex Work and Pleasure (Research for Sex Work Journal, Vol 11, 2009).

Live Multi-Studio Event at MediaCity

FRIDAY 14^th DECEMBER  from 1pm  til 1.30pm in SALFORD UNI FOYER

You are cordially invited to an exciting studio event at Salford University’s MediaCityUK campus this Friday lunchtime, Friday 14^th December  between  1pm and 1.30pm, to watch the screening of a live half hour entertainment show that will connect up all four of our MediaCityUK TV studio spaces in a single HD broadcast for the very first time.

On the huge screen in the Salford University foyer we will entertain you with a 30 minute show including a live band playing  in TV Studio A, a live drama being performed in Studio B, a live comedy talent show in the Digital Performance Lab, and a live news bulletin from the Journalism studio. The show, called Lights, Camera, Christmas will also be relayed live outside on the big screen in the MediaCityUK piazza.

Mince pies, mulled wine and music will be provided in the Salford University foyer after the live broadcast finishes at 1.30pm. All University staff, media professionals, students, friends  and family are most welcome to pop in to the foyer and watch the show going out live at 1.  There’s no need to book.

The show is being entirely produced, performed and crewed by Salford University students.

It is a highly ambitious event, pushing the boundaries of the hi-tech facilities in the University’s MediaCityUK campus building by connecting up two TV studios, a digital theatre space and a TV newsroom in a single HD broadcast – the first time such a feat has been attempted at a UK University.

It is also a very collaborative event bringing together students from a range of disciplines across Salford University including Music, Performance, Computer Science and Engineering, Creative Media, Fashion, Design and Journalism.

Lights, Camera, Christmas is being produced and delivered by 20 final year students on the degree in Television and Radio at Salford University. It’s a unique opportunity for all the students involved to showcase the skills they have acquired. We really hope you may be able to pop in on Friday 14^th at 1pm to support  them - and watch University history being made in a most entertaining way !

Congo Cases: The Stories of Human Rights History

Discussion workshop with Professor Eleni Coundouriotis (Connecticut)  for staff and PG researchers:

5.00pm – 6.30pm Tuesday 11th December 2012, Manchester Metropolitan University

Institute of Humanities and Social Science Research

Geoffrey Manton Building, Oxford Road, Manchester

“Congo Cases: The Stories of Human Rights History” 

 The essay to be discussed attempts to define a genre called “human rights history” by examining the persistent repetition of the “heart of darkness” narrative as a story of the encounter of the west with Africa. The essay delineates a typology of three kinds of narrative (the moral crusade, the redeemer witness, and the democratizing movement) as paradigmatic of human rights re-emplotments of already known historical circumstances. By identifying a dynamic of revelation and concealment, the essay provokes a debate about the claims of human rights history and its political underpinnings.

Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and Faculty Affiliate of the Human Rights Institute.

http://humanrights.uconn.edu/

Eleni’s research interests are in postcolonial literature, nineteenth-century comparative prose studies, cultural studies and human rights. Her publications include Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (1999) and the forthcoming The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony.

Prof. Coundouriotis will be offering an early evening workshop, for which staff and PG researchers can sign up on a first-come, first-served basis.

The workshop will introduce her own work and address the work of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.

Please email h.darby@mmu.ac.uk  ASAP to book a place and receive a copy of the reading and the location details.

Prof. Coundouriotis is also presenting a public lecture on the preceding evening, Monday 10th December on  "Naturalism, Humanitarianism and the Fiction of War"  Details for this are on Eventbrite here: http://elenicoundouriotis-arp-eorg.eventbrite.com/

MMP Grad Progs talks this Weds: Immersive Theatre // Cultural Politics of Blues Tourism

Wednesday 5 December: Richard 3.10 - 4pm; Mark 4.10 - 5pm. Room 3.02, MediaCity (University of Salford campus). All welcome and drinks after! (I'll be on reception at 3 and 4 to sign in non-Salford PGRs).


Internal Speaker:

Dr. Richard Talbot (University of Salford, Performance division, co-Artistic Director, Triangle Theatre)
Immersion for me/Immersion for you – perspectives from the InOnTheAct Festival

This papers has emerged from discussions on framing Immersive Theatre with Kathy McArdle (Quays Arts and Cultural Development Manager, The Lowry, Salford) and a survey of four companies involved in the InOnTheAct festival at The Lowry (6th  September – 3rd November 2012): Triangle; Look Left Look Right; Happystorm Theatre; and OscarMike.

The Lowry is promoting the festival as “immersive and risk-taking theatre” and, as the festival name suggests, these companies’ performances encourage audience members to become involved in the process of creation. The works present a range of “immersive” strategies involving heritage interpretation, mapping the city, one-to-one encounters, gaming and global politics, magic and playful comedy which all interrogate the role and position of the performer.

The paper will be based on longitudinal interviews with the artists involved, with the producer, marketing team, audiences and student participants and will offer an account of framing Immersive Theatre in this specific context. Its primary emphasis will the artistic methods and processes deployed, working primarily from the artists’ accounts of adapting, sustaining or rejecting established tactics over the course of the festival.

A central concern of the investigation will be to contrast the notion of immersion for the actor with the experience of immersion for the audience in this instance. For Triangle, for example, Immersive Theatre is concerned with the performer’s immersion as a mode of ongoing historical research shared with the audience, rather than private preparation and interpretation of a role. How will this tension between private and public in the assumption of role be resolved with audiences who may have experienced work by other artists and how will it be influenced, if at all, by the broader aims of the festival?


Guest Speaker: Dr. Mark Duffett

The Cultural Politics of Blues Tourism

The historical nature of authentic Southern folk blues as a cultural form necessarily creates what Jennifer Ryan has described the “fetishization of poverty.” In Clarksdale, for example, the Shack Up Inn recreates a series of shot gun shacks on an old plantation so that guests can immerse themselves in the living history of the area. The Inn’s web page explains, “Virtually unchanged from when it was a working plantation, you will find authentic sharecropper shacks, the original cotton gin and seed houses and other outbuildings.” Blues heritage travellers in effect follow in the footsteps of the original pilgrim, the field recordist and ballad hunter John Lomax. His visits to the South portrayed it as the part of America least touched by the modern media.  For contemporary white pilgrims, what seems like a nostalgic musical journey is a direct or indirect encounter with extreme poverty and racial injustice, a situation that necessarily implicates tourists as privileged subjects. It is not surprising, then, they may sometimes experience certain kind of anxiety mixed in with their enjoyment. Drawing on various sources, including some recent television documentaries about the Delta, I argue that, in a variety of ways, blues pilgrims negate or disarm the potential anxieties of their predicament. One example of this is the enlistment of relatively fortunate African American intermediaries to acts as tour guides. As much as it is a romantic quest to encounter the musical magic of the South, blues pilgrimage is therefore about the indirect assertion of social difference in modernity.

Dr Mark Duffett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chester who specializes in research on fandom and music audiences. He is currently editing two special editions of Popular Music & Society on the topic, as well as completing a textbook on media fandom for Continuum. He was keynote speaker at MARS 2012, held by the Sibelius Academy in Finland.

MMU Lecture: Naturalism, Humanitarianism and the Fiction of War

Monday 10^th December 2012

NATURALISM, HUMANITARIANISM AND THE FICTION OF WAR:

               

Public lecture by Professor Eleni Coundouriotis (Connecticut)

War has always occupied an important place in the African novel and, in recent years, has arguably become the dominant literary theme of works about Africa read outside Africa. As a subject, war presents particular challenges as it threatens to mire us in stereotypes of Africa as conflict ridden and dysfunctional. A close reading of the literature, however, reveals a great deal that counters these now static images. The war novel in Africa (from the 1960s through the 1990s) is in fact a people’s history, an attempt to write outside the frame of the Bildungsroman, the genre which dominated the literature of an educated, assimilated class, and imagine history from below. Because it has the characteristics of naturalist fiction, it is, moreover, linked to humanitarian discourse, and it is this relationship between naturalism and humanitarianism that situates it in the growing scholarship on human rights and literature. If war is the subject of humanitarianism par excellence, what could be the contribution of a reading of war fiction to the emerging academic discourse of human rights?

Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and Faculty Affiliate of the Human Rights Institute.

Eleni’s research interests are in postcolonial literature, nineteenth-century comparative prose studies, cultural studies and human rights. Her publications include Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (1999) and the forthcoming The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony.

Lecture 6.00pm Geoffrey Manton Lecture Theatre 5

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a&q=m16+5ll&ie=UTF-8&ei=8oK8UM-VOKqG0AWPqoD4Cg&ved=0CAUQ_AUoAA

Reception starts in the atrium at 5.30pm

ALL WELCOME

Please register on Eventbrite here:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Felenicoundouriotis-arp-eorg.eventbrite.com%2F&h=mAQGTutqr&s=1

Wildlife Photography Group

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.