Cultural and Media Policy Studies News and Events

The Centre for Cultural Policy Studies is pleased to announce the launch of the new MA in Arts, Enterprise and Development. The course is the first in the UK to examine the role of culture and the creative industries in International Development. It is also the first course to address the practical and strategic ways in which cultural enterprises and social entrepreneurs can use arts and media for social change, both locally and globally – through community building, economic and social regeneration, sustainable development, cultural tourism, and protecting indigenous cultures and heritage. The course is designed for students seeking careers in arts, media, International Development and social enterprise, and wishing to develop arts and media practices and strategies which address social problems including poverty, waste and inequality.

The first of this term's CCPS Research seminars will see Dr. Danielle Fuller of the University of Birmingham draw on her research into Mass Reading Events to give a talk entitled 'The value(s) of reading together: Book events, neo-liberal politics and moral power'.

This will be in G50, Millburn house on Wednesday 23rd October at 5.30pm. Refreshments will be provided. Please e-mail Paula Watkins p.watkins@warwick.ac.uk if you plan to attend.

Abstract:

The mass reading event (MRE) is a relatively new cultural form which aims to encourage communal, or shared, reading practices. ‘One Book, One Community’(OBOC) is one type of MRE originally conceived by Nancy Pearl and Chris Higashi, professional librarians working at the Center for the Book in Seattle, Washington in 1998. As the name suggests, a book, often but not always a work of literary fiction, is selected as the focus for a series of activities in which the citizens of a community, city, region or even nation, are invited to participate. During the first decade of the twenty-first century this model was adapted by cultural organisations in the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands (among others). Other leisure activities such as sports, and popular music are pursued by far more people than leisure reading in all of these nation-states, so why would community organizers, and government agencies choose the ‘One Book, One Community’ model (OBOC) of shared reading? What are the organizers of OBOCs hoping to achieve? What notions of cultural value are being brokered through the OBOC event model, and how is that value shaped by economic conditions and cultural policy? My case studies for this presentation will consist of a UK event (Bristol’s Great Reading Adventure) and a US American programme that is co-ordinated by the National Endowment for the Arts which sponsors versions of the OBOC model nation-wide.

Bio:
Danielle Fuller is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of American & Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has always been fascinated by writing, publishing and reading communities and the ways that knowledge and value are brokered within them. These interests informed her first book, 'Writing the Everyday: Atlantic Canadian Women's Textual Communities' (McGill-Queen's UP, 2004). Originally trained in literary studies, she has spent the last decade using methods from cultural studies while working on interdisciplinary projects with a communications scholar, DeNel Rehberg Sedo, including the AHRC-funded 'Beyond the Book' (www.beyondthebookproject.org). Their latest publication is the monograph, 'Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture' (Routledge, 2013).

Dr Joanne Garde-Hansen, Director of the MA Global Media and Communication and Prof Gilson Schwartz of the University of São Paulo, were among 400 applicants from 18 countries to secure funding from FAPESP/British Council Researcher Links 2013. The aim of the fund is to bring UK and Brazil researchers together on cutting edge issues. They will run a 3 day workshop April 22nd-25th 2014, at the University of São Paulo entitled Beyond the Digital - Collective Memory and Social Networks in Emerging Global Conflicts. This will engage 10 UK and 10 Brazilian Early Career Researchers, with a range of UK and Brazil professorial mentors. The workshop will explore innovative areas of media research stemming from the new, contemporary emergence of global and local voices of protest. The main aim is to bring to bear the theme of ‘collective memory and social networks’ upon a growing digital media literacy and emerging global democracy. ECRs will explore how (often closed) organisations, businesses and public spheres are repurposing memory and public feeling using social technologies in the context of real, global conflicts. They will exchange knowledge on digital heritage, memory and archives, the political economy of serious games as well as the historicity of entertainment and ludic ecosystems in cultural and creative industries, social networking and the regulation of online culture. The project complements the Santander funded Iconomy and Memory in UK/Brazil project.