IASPM conference at Salford: draft programme published!

Albion … Chocolate City … Highway 61 … Route 66 … Wonderland … Strawberry Fields … the Crossroads … Beale Street … Haight Ashbury … Music City U.S.A. ... Merseybeats ... Madchester ... Glastonbury

Popular music has always been affiliated with physical places, both literal and imaginary. It is one of the ways that the inhabitants of those locations define both their residence and themselves. To borrow the components of the title of Benedict Anderson’s widely read book, one of the most telling ways communities imagine themselves is acoustically. An indissoluble connection exists between musical expression and geography, both the landscape of actual locale and that conjured up by the mind. The persistent academic interest in the notion of scenes reflects this set of circumstances. So too does the research that examines how the state defines itself sonically and, in some cases, pursues its objectives with the assistance of acoustic apparatus, as in the torture of prisoners by a barrage of undesired sound. In addition, there are those composers, performers, compositions and performance practices that are thought to be quintessential expressions of states, peoples or defined populations.


This conference intends to examine this set of propositions across any possible array of musical forms, cultural practices, physical locations and imagined environments. It wishes to interrogate the ways in which geography and musicology can be affiliated.

Those “imagined communities” can include those that form specifically about music (fan bases, subcultures, on-line communities) as well as those that form through the formal elements of compositions (the use of “we” or “us” in lyrical constructions or the composition of anthems). Examples for study will, we hope, be drawn across an array of media as well, so that the use of media not only in live and recorded performance but also in any other particular media – film, radio, television, digital space – can be considered. It is hoped as well that while the invited speakers and plenary members may well address Anglo-American circumstances, the presentations will consider any and all portions of the globe as well as the digital ether.

Draft programme here

CFP: Language/Cinema (University of Leeds)

LANGUAGE/CINEMA

An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference

University of Leeds

December 7- 8th, 2012

Call for Proposals

Deadline: August 1^st, 2012

Film theorist Christian Metz once stated that: ‘The image is like a word, the sequence is like a sentence, for a sequence is made up of images like a sentence of words’. Though ground-breaking in its day, such an understanding has been contested on the basis that a linguistically-oriented semiology cannot adequately account for all the properties of the film medium. For instance, Gilles Deleuze rejects the notion of a language of cinema, referring instead to a language in cinema.

Whether in the film form or content, language remains a crucial issue in cinema. It is fundamental in the construction of an original story and script, in particular in literary adaptations. Language is the substance of the dialogue, be it spoken or conveyed in the form of intertitles. Language is also a visual component of the film, for example, in diegetic signs and billboards, or extradiegetic subtitles. Additionally, the use of language can be the very subject matter of a film, in a transnational world where multiculturalism is constantly reflected on screen.

The association of cinema with language offers an engagement with the text that both challenges and enriches the critique of the film medium in a variety of ways. This conference seeks to expand and explore the theme of language of, in and beyond cinema. This is a call for postgraduates to submit proposals around topics which include, but are not restricted to:

• · Cinema as language
• · Film and the written word
• · Literary and theatrical adaptations
• · Verbal and body language
• · Language and New Media technology
• · Regional dialects and identities
• · Endangered/minority languages and cinema
• · Language and intertextuality
• · Intertitles in silent and sound cinema
• · Subtitles, dubbing and the question of translation
• · Language and cosmopolitanism
• · Language and national identity
• 
  

Filmmakers and practitioners are also welcome to showcase their work at the conference.

Please send a 300 word abstract along with a 150 word biography to cwcinterns@gmail.com by August 1^st, 2012. Selected participants will be informed by September 1st. Please feel free to circulate this Call for Papers to your contacts. We look forward to welcoming you to Leeds in December 2012.

This Conference is supported by:

Mixed Cinema Network (Leeds, York, Sheffield)

WUN (Worldwide Universities Network)

BAFTSS (British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies)

Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange: full programme

What's it going to be then, eh? A Clockwork Orange is 50. Join us for three horrorshow days of talks, lectures, debates, music and films, 28-30 June

Full conference tickets are £70. Concessions are £40 and day tickets are £25: please contact us directly on info@anthonyburgess.org or 0161 235 0776 to purchase these, or ask us anything about the arrangements.

Screening: Once Upon a Time... A Clockwork Orange (2011)

27 June, 6.30pm
Cornerhouse
www.cornerhouse.org for tickets; discounts for conference delegates

This acclaimed and wonderfully unusual documentary looks at the cultural and historical contexts and philosophy underpinning A Clockwork Orange, featuring new archive material of both Stanley Kubrick and Anthony Burgess. Co-written by critic Michel Ciment, the film examines the rise of youth rebellion in the 1960s, anti-authoritarianism, urban insecurity and the popularity of behavioural therapy.

Concert: Music for A Clockwork Orange

28 June 6.30pm
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Free, booking essential: contact info@anthonyburgess.org

The UK premiere of Anthony Burgess’s music and songs for A Clockwork Orange, this will be a unique opportunity to experience Burgess’s music-hall ultraviolence. Includes a performance of a new piece by Kevin Malone, A Clockwork Operetta, commissioned by the Burgess Foundation

Lecture: Jonathon Green, Mister Slang

29 June, 5pm
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Part of the Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange conference: contact info@anthonyburgess.org or 0161 235 0776 for details

Jonathon Green has been described as the greatest British lexicographer since Dr Johnson. His many books include the monumental Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Cassell’s Dictionary of Insulting Quotations, and Getting Off at Gateshead: An A–Z of Filth. Join us for a horrorshow talk and discussion on Anthony Burgess’s language, slang and obscenity in A Clockwork Orange.

Screening: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

29 June, 6.30pm
Cornerhouse
www.cornerhouse.org for tickets; discounts for conference delegates

After forty years of controversy, Stanley Kubrick’s now classic adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel returns in all its glory to the big screen. Set in a warped futuristic Britain, charismatic delinquent and sociopath Alex is jailed and volunteers for an experimental aversion therapy developed by the government in an effort to solve society’s crime problem… but not all goes to plan. This is an incredibly rare opportunity to revisit Burgess and Kubrick’s possibly prescient vision of a violent dystopian future.

Lecture: Peter Kramer - Is it some devil that crawls inside of you?

30 June, 5pm
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Part of the Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange conference: contact info@anthonyburgess.org or 0161 235 0776 for details

An acknowledged expert on the history of cinema, Peter Kramer has written extensively on silent films, Buster Keaton, Hollywood and the Germans, Audrey Hepburn, Disney, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick. He is the author of the recent book-length study A Clockwork Orange – Controversies and will speak with his characteristic erudition and infectious enthusiasm on Burgess, Kubrick and youth culture.

Screening: Vinyl (1965)

30 June, 6.20pm
Cornerhouse
www.cornerhouse.org for tickets; discounts for conference delegates

Featuring a collection of stars from New York’s The Factory studio, Vinyl was Andy Warhol’s earlier and much less well known adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. A fascinating companion piece to Stanley Kubrick’s now legendary take on the novel, this is an ultra rare screening of this uncompromising and experimental 16mm work.
Full programme:
http://www.anthonyburgess.org/mediablog/fifty-years-of-a-clockwork-orange-full-programme?utm_source=AnthonyBurgessmailinglist&utm_campaign=68e382776b-Events_late_june&utm_medium=email

Speakers include Salford's Joe Darlington and Dr Benjamin Halligan

Salford symposium: Translating Hungarian Histories

We are delighted to announce the provisional programme for our international symposium, Translating European Histories, taking place on Monday 2nd July (please see below and attached).

Do e-mail Szilvi (s.naray-davey@salford.ac.uk) and Ursula (u.k.hurley@salford.ac.uk) to reserve your FREE place!

Please forward to anyone else who may be interested - especially postgraduate students.

We look forward to seeing you on the day.

Szilvi and Ursula

Translating European Histories
A one-day symposium supported by the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence
Monday, 2nd July 2012
Provisional Programme

Venue: University of Salford, Peel Park campus. Room to be confirmed.

9:30 onwards Registration and coffee (a light breakfast of pastries and sweet treats will be offered)

10:15 Welcome and Introduction

10:30 Keynote Speaker: György Dragomán, Hungarian novelist, author of A fehér király (The White King)

11:30 Coffee

11:40 Panel 1 Chaired by Szilvi Naray-Davey, University of Salford

Dr. Márta Minier, University of Glamorgan, “Tradition Prepared Her. Change Will Define Her”: Translating History into Bio- Docudrama

Dr. Andrew Armstrong, The University of the West Indies, Fictionalising the Historical Dimensions of Blackness in Europe: The case of Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners

Professor Brenda Cooper, University of Manchester, African and Shared Personhood Choreographed in Dancing Words

1:00- 2:00 LUNCH (As we are not charging an attendance fee we hope that you don’t mind purchasing your own lunch from the campus café.)

2:00 Creative interlude

Introduced by Jenny Dutton, postgraduate student (MA Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment)

Leanne Bridgewater, Homophonic Translations

Anna T. Szabó, Poetry reading in the original Hungarian followed by the English Translation

2:30 Panel 2 chaired by Dr. Ursula Hurley, University of Salford

Dr. Alan Williams/Brendan Williams, School of Music, Media and Performance, The University of Salford, On Memory in Centre/Periphery (with reference to a performance on cimbalom alongside arranged soundscape)

Szilvi Naray-Davey, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, The University of Salford, Between the words? The influence of performance on translating from source text to target text in contemporary Hungarian drama.

Dr. Judy Kendall, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, The University of Salford, Collaborative and creative translation processes in poetry: difficulties and solutions

3.50 Concluding remarks

Thanks to funding from the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, this symposium is free to attend. www.manchester.ac.uk/jeanmonnet

Everette N'dlovu conference report: Convergence, Engagement and Power

Never in my academic history have I seen media convergence raise so much interest among researchers --  as was shown in the Convergence, Engagement and Power 6^th Annual PhD Conference, which was held at The Institute of Communications Studies, in Leeds, on the 24^th of May 2012.

This PhD students-led initiative embarked on an intensive academic debate concerning the role of media convergence in the democratisation of the globe. The conference papers scrutinised the role of new media technologies and particularly those facilitated by the Internet in empowering citizens to challenge dominant hegemony. The conference critically examined the role of popular social media interactive platforms which have permeated every aspect of  everyday life and which are credited with major political changes that have taken place in recent times. These are, for example The Arab Spring uprising and the Occupy Movements, which were replicated in Nigeria, London and Wall Street.

The participants gave a detailed analysis of the extent to which publics, through their engagement with new technology and convergent media, influence or challenge the political, corporate, and social power structures within society.

These technologies are seen by academic like Hamilton (2000) as technologies of democracy and liberation in which the user is at the same time the producer of the media, and has access to multiple platforms with which to receive and disseminate information in a de-professionalised, de-institutionalised and de-capitalised but indeed highly politicised (my emphasis) environment.

They critically questioned claims made about the effectiveness of  new technologies in enabling the viability of populist political movements. Fascination about the creations and sustenance of alternative media channels, and the dissemination of information, with ideas and political expressions unhindered, was given an academic litmus test and returned many otherwise taken-for-granted conclusions back on the spotlight. The academics were left asking if the authority, legitimacy and hegemony of the ruling elite are threatened by the convergent media.

This conference had presentations from panels of PhD researchers from all over the world, showcasing their research and generating questions and answer sessions. What emerged from all the papers was the interest in the role of modern communication technologies in giving the demos (people) cratos (power), in what the world calls democracy. In the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" (Young 1996).

Salford CFP: Rhythm Changes

Call for Papers
Rhythm Changes II: Rethinking Jazz Cultures
11-14 April 2013, Media City UK/University of Salford
An international conference hosted by the Rhythm Changes research project at the University of Salford.
Keynote Speakers
E. Taylor Atkins, Northern Illinois University
David Ake, University of Nevada, Reno

‘From its beginnings, jazz has presented a somewhat contradictory social world: Jazz musicians have worked diligently to tear down old boundaries, but they have just as resolutely constructed new ones; jazz provided one of the first locations of successful interracial cooperation in America, yet it has also served to perpetuate negative stereotypes and to incite racial unrest.’

Workshop: Approaching publishers - a guide for academic authors

The workshop is taking place on Tuesday 12 June from 2 – 4pm in Gilbert Room 2, and is led by Anthony Haynes who has extensive experience in publishing.

It is part of the VC Early Career Researcher’s Programme, but there are some additional spaces available for other researchers who would be interested in attending. Please could participants email me  (v.m.sheppard@salford.ac.uk) by Monday 11 June to confirm a place.  

The workshop is aimed at anyone interested in finding out more about academic publishing. It is open to all disciplines, but the focus is particulary centred on book publishing. Please see below for more details.

This session will provide guidance from a publishing industry insider.publishing and help early-career researchers to approach publishers with confidence. The session will outline the academic publishing industry and explain how academic authors get commissioned. The main focus will be on the dos and don’ts of approaching publishers. In particular, detailed practical advice will be provided on how to write book proposals. The session will explain typical reasons behind publishers’ acceptance (or rejection) of proposals, and provide guidance on practical resources that are available to help academics develop their authorial careers. There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion.

Anthony Haynes is Director of The Professional and Higher Partnership Ltd. He teaches academic authorship for the University of Tartu (Estonia) and is Visiting Professor at Hiroshima University. He also provides mentoring on writing development for researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Essex. Anthony’s publications include Writing Successful Textbooks (A&C Black, 2001) and Writing Successful Academic Books (CUP, 2010).

Grad Prog talks this Weds (6/June)

Adelphi House, 2nd floor lecture theatre:

Internal Speaker: Dr Michael Goddard. 3.10 - 4pm

A Deleuzian 21st Century?: Deleuze and Contemporary Media and Cultural Research

Of any of the post-structuralist theorists associated with the ‘68 generation (Foucualt, Derrida, Lyotard etc), Deleuze’s work is perhaps the most contemporary with the present. In the 1970s Foucault said “perhaps the [20th] Century will become known as Deleuzian” but, in fact, Deleuze’s work, especially in an Anglo context, has had something of a delayed impact. It is only now that this work is beginning to take root in the academy while still enjoying the popularity it has had for decades among art students, postgraduates, autodidacts and range of academic outsiders. So perhaps it is the 21st Century that is becoming Deleuzian.

Rather than the impossible presentation of Deleuze’s work in its entirety, this seminar will give a sketch of its take-ups at various times and in various contexts and focus on its use value for media and cultural research. It will suggest some useful paths into Deleuze’s work via key interviews and short texts as well as suggestions for further reading, and especially deal with those aspects of his work which engage directly or indirectly with questions of media and culture, culminating in an opening to his work on cinema.

External Speaker: Dr Andy Robinson. 4pm - 5pm

(Host: Dr Phoebe Moore-Carter)

Dr. Andrew Robinson is a critical theorist and activist working on a range of topics around social movements, radical theory, oppressive discourse, global power-structures and everyday life. He is co-author of Power, Conflict and Resistance in the Contemporary World, which applies Deleuzian theory to the analysis of social movement networks, reactive networks and the world-system. He has two dozen published articles and papers including “Symptoms of a New Politics: Networks, Minoritarianism and the Social Symptom in Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari”, “Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Spivak and the Subaltern”, and pieces on Gramsci, Zizek, Laclau, Virilio, Negri, Sartre, post-left anarchy, global justice, the Zapatistas, anarchist theories of war, social movements in Manipur, revolutionary subjectivity, US foreign policy, and global exclusion.

Time and Dialogism in Deleuzian Theory

This paper will examine the Deleuzian theory of time, developed in Deleuze’s books on Bergson and Cinema, with a focus on the themes of dialogue and the Event. It will begin by summarising Deleuze’s concepts of past, present and future. It will explain how each perspective is differentiated as a sensorimotor zone constructed through attention to life, providing a particular zone of resonance unique to each person. It will also explain how Deleuze proposes to understand possibilities for dialogue between such zones through the Bergsonian idea of intuition. It will also discuss how the event is seen to interrupt monological sequences of time. Finally, it will explore the idea of “absolute deterritorialisation” and the relevance of Deleuze’s theory of time for social transformation.