PhD scholarships at Leeds Met: sex, gender, power, identity and risk.

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’ 

Researchers and potential PhD supervisors working this theme are: Dr. Bridgette Rickett, Dr. Sarah Kingston, Dr Peter Branney, Dr. Katy Day, Dr. Natalia Gerodetti,  Dr. Helen Fawkner, Dr Zoe Kolokotroni, Dr. Kate Milnes and Dr. Tamara Turner-Moore

 

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)

Closing deadline – 7^th June 2013

For further details and how to apply see: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/research/research-bursaries.htm

Working Class Movement Library talks

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.

Grad Prog talks (22/5): the Market Street Mincer / Sex and the Shameless City

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 by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Beth has recently co-edited a new collection entitled Television, Sex and Society: Analyzing Contemporary Representations (Continuum Press, August 2012).

Secret City screening

Salford PGR SPARC conference (5&6 June) programme published

See http://www.salford.ac.uk/research/postgraduate-research/sparc/conference-programme 

Deborah Gabriel: "Ethnic and gender inequalities in postgraduate study STILL aren't being addressed"

Another broadsheet intervention from Salford PGR Deborah Gabriel:

"The lack of diversity within postgraduate study leads to a further lack of diversity in the academy. This feeds into the curriculum and has an impact on the student experience. Universities need to go beyond the inclusion of statements about ‘valuing diversity’ on their websites and in their glossy brochures."

Full article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/student/postgraduate/postgraduate-study/ethnic-and-gender-inequalities-in-postgraduate-study-still-arent-being-addressed-8599466.html?origin=internalSearch#

Grad Prog talks this Weds (8 May): Studying TV News // Research and Writing for Students

MediaCity campus, Room 2.20. (Non-Salford students and PGRs can sign in at reception at 3 and at 4).

Internal presentation, 3.10-4pm 

Dr Sharon Coen (Psychology)

The talk will present results from a large comparative study on 'Media Systems, Political Context and Informed Citizenship: an 11 Nations study'.

The study consisted of a content analysis of (among others) TV News and a survey on a large representative sample in each Nation (Australia, Canada, Colombia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Norway, UK and US). I am hoping to get some useful feedback concerning the best way to present the wealth of information gathered.

Guest lecturer:

Dr Rob Edgar (York St John University), 4.10-5pm.

Theorising Practice and Writing for Education: Writing for an Audience

This presentation will discuss the role of the academic in writing specifically for a student audience. While debates persist over the nature and importance of "pure" academic research, the issues of impact and relevance are becoming ever more importance. And, in approaching these issues, the functions of educational writing and and the role of practice in research are revealed to be increasingly relevant, and vital, as forms of research.

Dr Robert Edgar is Head of Postgraduate Film and Television Production at York St John University.  In this role he heads the MAs in Film Production and Documentary Production and supervises PhD students, increasingly in practice led theses.  He is the author and co-author of a number of text books for the AVA series in Film making and, with Salford's Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs and Benjamin Halligan, co-edited The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (Routledge, 2013).

Visit and Lecture from Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus on Saturday 18 May

On Saturday 18 May, Professor Muhammad Yunus, the “world’s banker to the poor”, will visit Salford, giving colleagues, students and members of the public the chance to speak with the inspiring world leader.
Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker and economist widely credited for developing the concepts of microcredit and microfinance.

He is only the seventh person in history to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. This achievement places him in the company of Norman Borlaug, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Teresa.
Yunus’ concept of micro-credit – small loans given to poor villagers in Bangladesh to help them buy livestock or fund an enterprise – has grown from $27 he loaned out of his own pocket into the Grameen Bank, which has loaned more than $25 billion to some 20 million borrowers around the world. Despite a lack of collateral or signed loan documents, 99 per cent of the loans have been paid back. The Grameen Bank provides services to more than 71,000 villages in Bangladesh alone through 2,226 branches and his programme now operates in more than 100 countries including the USA. The first Grameen branch in the UK will open soon.

At our 18 May summit, which will mark the announcement of Salford’s new Social Business Centre, Yunus will speak about the importance of social ventures that depart from purely profit-driven business models. He will also urge students and all those with entrepreneurial spirit to consider pursuing businesses motivated by social causes rather than profit alone. Yunus will be joined by number of distinguished guest speakers including Salford alumna Fay Selvan (CEO of the Big Life Group) and who will present ideas, solutions and case studies on the impact of social business creation on the lives and health of disadvantaged communities.
Colin McCallum, Executive Director of University Advancement, said: “Having Professor Yunus visit the University is a tremendous privilege and coup for us. He is one of the world’s most inspiring individuals and one of the original Global Elders, along with Nelson Mandela, Mary Robinson and Kofi Annan. His visit has sparked an interest among a number of colleagues to build on many activities already taking place across campus around the encouragement of social enterprise, social and community benefit and micro-finance research. Salford is a University that has always been firmly rooted in its local community, but with international reach. Muhammad Yunus exemplifies our mission and I hope his visit will serve to inspire us all.”
For more information and to register for this event on Saturday 18 May, please register at https://supporters.salford.ac.uk/MuhammadYunus.

Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer

A RadicalAesthetics/RadicalArt (RaRa) event

People’s History Museum, Manchester,

FRIDAY June 14th 2013

Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer will explore the history and relevance of the pamphlet for contemporary art practice through presentations by speakers and performers.  The one-day event will coincide with a small display of selected pamphlets from the PHM collection (curated by the RaRa organisers) together with a selection from our ‘call for pamphlets’.

Radical Pamphlets

It is written because there is something that one wants to saynow, and one believes there is no other way of getting a hearing. Pamphlets may turn on points of ethics or theology but they always have a clear politicalimplication. A pamphlet may be written either for or against somebody or something, but in essence it is always a protest.

George Orwell (1948) in British Pamphleteers Volume 1, from the sixteenth century to the French Revolution

For Orwell, the pamphlet is a polemical provocation. Through the 20thc and beyond, artists have worked and acted provocatively and polemically with text, images and performance, publishingwritings and producing pamphlets and manifestoes, including the Futurists (1909), Surrealists (1924), Fluxus (George Maciunas, 1963), First Things First (Ken Garland 1964), Mierle Laderman Ukeles (Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969) and Stewart Home’s Neoist Manifestos (1987). More recently, in 2009, Monica Ross and fifteen others co-recited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the  Anniversary of The Peterloo Massacre at John Rylands Library Manchester and the Freee Art Collective have performed their manifestoes in a range of public settings. The edited book (2011) by Danchev 100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists (Penguin Modern Classics) demonstrates it as subject of current interest.

The last decade has seen art’s increasing engagement with political and social issues, whereby in some instances artists’ activities have become indistinguishable from social activism (e.g. Wochenklauser) or other disciplinary functions (e.g. artist as ‘anthropologist’ as in Jeremy Deller’s Folk Archive).The art community’s current preoccupation with revolutionary movements and global politics is being addressed from different perspectives. The format and traditions of the ‘radical pamphlet’ may provide an alternative platform for artistic intervention and provocation.

The People’s History Museum (PHM) is a national research facility, archive and accredited public museum, which contains unique collections of documents and artefacts. The collection includes the British Labour Party and Communist Party of Great Britain papers, extensive amateur and documentary film holdings and the largest trade union and protest banner collection in the world. The Museum suits our particular brief of radicality in its focus on histories of radical collective action.

http://www.phm.org.uk/

The RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt  (RaRa) project was initiated in 2009 at Loughborough University (LU) under the auspices of the Politicized Practice Research Group (PPRG). The RaRa project and its associated book series (with I.B. Tauris) explores the meeting of contemporary art practice and interpretations of radicality to promote debate, confront convention and formulate alternative ways of thinking about art practice. Previous RaRa events have included ‘DIY cultures’ and Radical Footage: Film and Dissent at Nottingham Contemporary.

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sota/research/groups/politicised/index.html

http://www.ibtauris.com/Highlights/Radical%20Aesthetics%20Radical%20Art.aspx

Book here: http://store.lboro.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=199&deptid=252&catid=72