Journalism, Activism, Community - Work in progress - new projects and emerg...

Rachel-Ann Charles (BCU) The ‘after party’: Musings of a Post-Doc

My presentation will focus on my transition from PhD to post-doc research. I will discuss some of the main outcomes of my Doctoral thesis and the way in which these outcomes are currently being converted into research outputs through the Faculty Research Investment Scheme (FRIS). I will also talk about some of the opportunities for collaborative work with Caribbean-based institutions through Erasmus+ funding.

Rachel-Ann is a Visiting Lecturer at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University (BCU) where she teaches across the undergrad and postgrad programmes. She is also a Researcher at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, BCU and is a member of the Journalism, Activism & Community and Jazz Research clusters. Her main research interests are community media, youth, and more broadly the Caribbean creative industries. See Rachel-Ann’s Academia.edu profile for more details on her research activities.

Resistance-by-recording: the visuality and visibility of contentious political action in Egypt, Palestine Syria and Yemen
Funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, in partnership with Stockholm University

The overall aim of the project is to explore the successes and potentialities, as well as limitations and challenges that camera-related practices bring to the objectives of contemporary protest movements across the Arab world. It advances a media-practice based approach - with ethnographic field studies – in order to explore and theorize how variously situated activists creatively and strategically use digitally networked cameras and images to address local concerns – within the boundaries of existing media ecologies that offer different opportunities and constraints in each particular setting. In re-centring the agency of human beings over technologies, a critical purpose of the project is also to explore the meanings that practices of creating, distributing, editing, sharing, viewing and archiving images acquire for differently located participants. This is to say that the project attends to political image production also as subjective, embodied and performative practice. Activists not only use cameras to speak truth to power, but to realize or produce themselves as political subjects and negotiate exactly what such a subjectivity may be and can do. A key objective of the project is therefore to examine how different individuals and groups are reflecting on – and struggling with – precisely the kind of subjects they want to cultivate with such practices.

Sid Peacock (BCU) Grow Your Own Festival – Surge in spring 2

The presentation will be about the Grow Your Own Festival - Surge in Spring 2 which Sid is curating at Midlands Arts Centre on 21st April 2018. The festival aims to provide an open space for experimentation and collaboration across art forms and we are keen to hear from anyone wanting to be involved.

Sid Peacock is a composer/musician from Northern Ireland based in Birmingham since 2003. He leads Surge Orchestra and his musical practice spans folk, roots, classical and jazz. He presently holds a research position at BCU.

Siobhan Stevenson (BCU) REF, TEF & the bits in between; Coalescing Community, Outreach and Career development

This session will explore the tensions between teaching and research commitments, finishing a PhD and think through how to bring all of your interests, ideas and areas of work together to develop your profile and career.

Siobhan Stevenson is a Lecturer in Radio Studies & Professional Development at BCU's School of Media. Siobhan is also a member of BCMCR and is currently undertaking PhD research exploring Discourses of Community Radio; Social Gain Policies in Practice, which investigates articulations of policy to programming in three community radio stations in Birmingham.