Monday 30 January 2012

Salford Postgrad Conference 2012: Call for Papers!

All postgraduate researchers are invited to take part in the University of Salford’s Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC).

This year’s conference is taking place on Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31st May 2012. It’s free to attend and a great way of developing presentation skills, sharing ideas, publicising your research to new audiences, getting feedback, and meeting researchers from other disciplines and universities.

We are inviting 250-word abstracts for a range of presentation formats. Please see the website for more details about SPARC and how to apply www.salford.ac.uk/research/sparc

The closing date for abstracts is Friday 16 March 2012

Any queries, please contact us on sparc@salford.ac.uk


We look forward to hearing from you!
Victoria (on behalf of the SPARC team)
(Dr Victoria Sheppard)

Sunday 29 January 2012

Grad Prog talk, 1/Feb

External speaker:
Prof Jackie Stacey
Professor Stacey’s academic background is an interdisciplinary one, combining European Studies (Sussex), Women’s Studies (Kent) and Cultural Studies (Birmingham). She currently works at the University of Manchester, specializing in feminist cultural theory and its bearing upon questions of political transformation. As well as being a co-editor of two journals, Screen and Feminist Theory, her publications include Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and (as co-author with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury) Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). She has also co-edited a number of books, including Romance Revisited with Lynne Pearce (1995), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader with Annette Kuhn (1998), Thinking Through the Skin with Sara Ahmed (2001) and Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007).


The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown
Across the humanities and social sciences we are currently witnessing a move towards a renewed cosmopolitanism. In these debates, cosmopolitan ideals blend a liberal notion of ‘openness to others’ with a sense of 'worldliness' that might welcome the flow of diversity and proximity to the unfamiliar. This talk questions the celebratory tone of this renewed cosmopolitanism through a reading of Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000). If the promise of the cosmopolitan project is to be found in the notion of what we might call a more ‘open sociality’, then this talk explores how Code Unknown turns the processes of spectatorship into the ethical testing ground for such a vision.


Second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House, 4.15-5.15pm.

Building 3 on page 3 of this map: http://www.salford.ac.uk/travel/campus-map.pdf
(NB: Not Adelphi Building, and beware of Google Maps that confuses the two).

Monday 23 January 2012

Salford celebrates LGBT History Month 2012

The University’s annual celebration of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) History Month begins on Thursday, 2 February, with a special launch event.

Staff are invited to join leading figures from the world of sport and media for a discussion on the representation of LGBT issues in contemporary sports journalism.

The guests taking part in Sports Media and Sexuality: A Panel Discussion will include basketball star Jon Amaechi, who was the first NBA player to come out; former BBC commentator and sports reporter Bob Ballard; Sarah Williams, Equality & Diversity Manager for Rugby Football League; Claire Harvey, Paralympian sitting volleyball player; Chris Noble MBE, Director Sheffield Eagles, and Dave Randles, sports journalist and Salford lecturer.

The event, which heralds the start of a programme of LGBT History Month activities at the University, takes place at the MediaCityUK campus, from 6.15pm until 8.30pm.

It will be preceded by Take Action: Make Schools Safer – a workshop for teachers, aimed at helping schools to challenge homophobic bullying, support all their young people and promote understanding across communities.

A diverse range of other activities will be happening throughout the month, including music, training sessions, a pub quiz and writing workshops.

On The Fringes, a storytelling workshop led by writer Michelle Green, will take place on Tuesday, 7 February, 12pm-2pm. It will be a unique opportunity to explore untold stories with a focus on the experience of being on the fringe of mainstream LGBT discourse.

The Lesbian and Gay Foundation will host a pub quiz at Bar Yours on Friday, 17 February, 5.30pm-7pm. From sport and entertainment to politics and history, see how much you know about the achievements and contributions made by leading LGBT figures.

On Thursday, 21 February, TREC will deliver a Transgender Equality Training session, in University House, between 2pm and 4pm.

The sessions have been developed to increase awareness and understanding of the trans-diversity strand. They provide best practice guidance and legal information through presentations, group exercised and real-life scenarios.

The LGBT History Month celebrations will come to a close on Wednesday, 29 February, with a unique performance by the Manchester Lesbian & Gay Chorus. The choir has toured internationally and won the Silver Medal in the 2009 World OutGames, in Copenhagen.

LGBT Staff Network Co-chair Holly Cruise said: “The University’s LGBT Staff Network welcomes colleagues, students and the public to help celebrate the achievements of our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, and to explore what more we can do for members of the LGBT community, and their families, friends and colleagues.

“LGBT History Month is an inclusive event and we look forward to seeing a wide range of people at the various events.”

For more information on the events, including details on times and venues, please visit http://www.equality.salford.ac.uk/page/lgbt_2012.

Thursday 19 January 2012

De-Nastification


Our thanks to Dr Xavier Mendik (seen here with Greg Bevan) for his fantastic talk on "Cannibal Holocaust", and for screening his new documentary on the making and reclaiming of the film.







Xavier's definitive Cult Film Reader (which includes an essay by our own Prof David Sanjek) is available here.

Join Professor Ben Light for his Professorial Inaugural Lecture

Professor Ben Light, Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, invites you to attend his Professorial Inaugural Lecture, Contemporary Digital Media, Gender and Sexuality, on Tuesday, 7 February, in room 2.36 from 6.30pm at MediaCityUK.
 
The lecture will draw upon his studies of Internet dating, digital gaming, social networking sites and ‘social media’ to consider the continuing importance of ‘the digital’ with respect to gender and sexuality in everyday life.
His research over the past five years has mainly focused on people’s experiences of living with a variety of digital media – particularly that which is associated with the Internet.
As well as his academic roles, Professor Light is a member of the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Research Centre and sits on the University’s Digital Cluster Executive.
Professor light is currently working on a book entitled ‘Social Networking Practices and Everyday Lives’ which is due to be published next year by Palgrave.
If you would like to register to attend this event, please click here http://supporters.salford.ac.uk/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=775&srctid=1&erid=447126 or call Paul Butlin on x55114

Digital Curation Centre Roadshow, Salford, 20-21 March

I am very pleased to tell you that Salford has been selected to host the 9th Digital Curation Centre regional roadshow on research data management, which will take place on 20th and 21st March. Professor Martin Hall has kindly agreed to give the opening address.

The programme and venue is currently being finalised, with opportunities on Day 1 to showcase related Salford initiatives. If you or your colleagues have a project that you would like to present as a case study, please let me know.

The roadshow is being organised by The Library in conjunction with the DCC, and you can now register to attend the roadshow here:

Monday 16 January 2012

MMP Grad Programme talks: Weds 18 Jan

All sessions: second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House
Building 3 on page 3 of this map: http://www.salford.ac.uk/travel/campus-map.pdf
(NB: Not Adelphi Building, and beware of Google Maps that confuses the two).



Internal Speaker: Mary Oliver (3.10 - 4pm)

Mary Oliver has been a performance artist for almost 30 years working across the fields of theatre, music, fine art and creative technology. For over a decade she has focussed on the creation of digital performance works and has collaborated with animators, film-makers, composers, computer programmers and most recently with a cognitive psychologist on the creation of interactive performance works that often play with the humour of the human-technological interface. Mary is Reader in Performance, Head of the Performance Research Centre and is leading the development of Digital Performance Research at the new Digital Media Performance Lab at MCUK.

“Practice as Research” Seminar
This session will be useful for anyone interested in research methods for creative practitioners. Mary's will use a number of her recent interdisciplinary performance and technology projects as case studies with which to distinguish the differences between practice and practice-as-research. She will focus on planning, writing proposals, execution (specifically working in interdisciplinary teams) documentation and dissemination of PAR


External Speaker: Dr Xavier Mendik (4.15 - 5.10)

Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and DVD label at Brunel University, from where he also runs the Cult Film Archive and research centre. He has written extensively on cult and horror traditions, and some of his publications in this area include The Cult Film Reader (2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (2002), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (2002) and Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000). Xavier has recently completed 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathis), to be released in October 2011 as part of the BFI/Palgrave film guide series, and is currently completing a monograph on 1970s Italian cult film. Beyond his academic writing, Xavier has an established profile as a documentary filmmaker and distributor. He was responsible for the 2011 high-definition UK restoration of Dario Argento’s Suspiria for the Nouveaux Pictures / Cine-Excess. Further details of these activities can be found on www.cine-excess.co.uk


The Long Road Back From Hell:

Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust

A Documentary Screening and Discussion

In 1979, Italian director Ruggero Deodato created Cannibal Holocaust, a film that was to revolutionise and scandalise the nature of realist horror cinema. Deodato’s influential and infamous tale centres on four intrepid documentary filmmakers who go missing in the Amazonian wilderness, leading to fears that they have been butchered by local ‘savages.’  However, when the famous NYU anthropologist Harold Monroe discovers the group’s final filmed diary, a far more shocking tale emerges…

With its complex narrative and innovative use of documentary style techniques, Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust initiated a trailblazing trend of ‘found footage horror’ that continued through to The Blair Witch Project (1999) and beyond. However, the film’s stylishness was overshadowed by it savage imagery, which lead to the movie being banned and heavily censored in many European countries.

In Britain, the film became the most notorious ‘video nasty’ of the early 1980s, and was only subsequently released in the UK in a heavily censored version. However, in 2011, Cine-Excess and Brunel University academics including Xavier Mendik and Professor Julian Petley framed the official BBFC submission of the new HD master of Cannibal Holocaust on behalf of the distributor Shameless Films. This application resulted in a landmark BBFC ruling, which now allows the most complete cut of Cannibal Holocaust to be released across the UK in September 2011.

To tie in with this newly restored, high definition release of the film, Xavier Mendik will be discussing the long road back from hell for one of cinema’s most contentious titles. The seminar includes a screening of his new documentary The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust, which is included on the new Shameless Films Blu-ray and DVD release of the film. The documentary charts the film’s controversial history, as well as its even more confrontational use of realist techniques, whilst also assessing its socio-cultural context in relation to Italy’s turbulent ‘Years of Lead’. 

Short film competition

Brief to Universities: Arts Council England State of the Arts Film Project

State of Arts 2012: Artists shaping the world is the Arts Council’s national conference for the arts and culture sector. BBC presenter Kirsty Wark will chair the sold out event which will be attended by senior staff from arts and culture organisations, artists, politicians and journalists. Delegates at the event and online audiences contributing via social media channels will be a critical part of the discussions which will follow nine themes. The conference will take place on 14 February at The Lowry in Salford, and is hosted in conjunction with the BBC, Salford City Council, Manchester City Council and the British Council.

Arts Council England and the BBC invite students from three north universities, Salford, York and Sunderland, to make short films responding to one or more of the nine themes of the conference – view the themes animation on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-7RtYQgI9Y

A panel at Arts Council England will then select and promote the best of the submitted films to stimulate discussion on the State of the Arts blog and the Arts Council social media channels prior to and during the conference.

List of themes:

Artists and a changing society

What is the role of the artist in a changing society? Does politics really affect the arts? How important is it to artists to seed ideas and debate that impact on society as well as art?

Artists and the imagination

What inspires the imagination? What gets in the way? How is talent developed? Do we do it well enough?

Artists boosting the creative economy

Do artists think of themselves as part of a creative economy or an economy at all? Do they need to? Why? Why not? Who are the new artists of the future and how do we develop them?

Artists shaping communities

How is the way that artists work in and with communities changing? What impact have they made? Could they make?

Artists and international perspectives

How are artists shaping the world? Are our international links strong enough? What gets in the way?

Artists and young people

How do you make your way? How is talent spotted and developed? How could more young people get a chance to get involved in the arts?

Artists and audiences - great art for everyone

What does the audience really expect its great art to be?

Artists and fundraising

Why give/sponsor? What are the challenges?

Artists and our future environment

Can artists really impact on climate change?

Guidelines

Your film must:

· be shot in 16:9 ratio

· be no more than two minutes long

· include the following line to encourage online discussion:

Have your say #sota12

How to submit your entry

To submit please upload your film to a YouTube or Vimeo account and send a link with a brief synopsis of your film identifying your chosen State of the Arts theme to digital@artscouncil.org.uk with the subject line ‘SOTA12 STUDENT FILM’.

Deadline

The deadline for submissions is noon on 2 February 2012, successful the chosen films will be announced on 7 February 2012.


Feedback

All selected film makers will receive one-to-one feedback about their film from BBC producers at Media City in Salford.

Saturday 7 January 2012

Call for Applications: Burgess Foundation PhD bursary

Applications are invited for a PhD bursary, to support research into the literature or music of Anthony Burgess. The bursary will support a scholar beginning his or her studies in the academic year 2012-13.
Areas of research might include Anthony Burgess and his contemporaries, or a critical investigation into one of the areas in which Burgess published (e.g. dystopia, historical fiction, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Joyce, literary journalism, literary biography, or 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 31 March 2012.

Thursday 5 January 2012

Nancy Redoubled: a politics of sense and a sense of politics

Day School – Friday January 13, 2012
10.00am-5.30 pm
Anthony Burgess Foundation, Chorlton Mill, Cambridge Street, Manchester MI 5BY, UK



Every sensory register thus bears with it both its simple nature and its tense, attentive or anxious state: seeing and looking, smelling and sniffing or scenting, tasting and savouring, touching and feeling or palpating, hearing and listening. Nancy: Listening (2002) p. 5

Jean Luc Nancy (1940- ) offers a rich and diverse group of enquiries for discussion, dissection and appropriation. The diversity of register (partage des voix) and the detailed discussion of individual art practices (evidence du film) make up a formidable call for a reassessment of the task and goals of aesthetics, and of any philosophy of art. The discussions of inoperative and confronted community, of the inheritance of Marxism and communist hope, and of the unsacrificeable disrupt common places about the form and function of political theory.

When brought to bear on each other these two lines of enquiry form no less than a major innovation in the ordering and disordering of the sub-disciplines of philosophy, and of their role in the formation and disruption of other disciplines. By opening up discussion of these thematics to further interrogation our three speakers will provide a framing for a more thoroughgoing reception of these notions, of their grounds and prospects.

Speakers:
Dr Claudia Baracchi, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Universita degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Italy
Author of Of Myth Life and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington Indiana 2002), and of Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2011)
Dr Ignaas Devisch, Professor of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Medicine, holding posts at Ghent University and the University College Arteveldehogeschool, Belgium.
Title: The form of politics Nancy and ‘Leformal’ democracy
Dr Rachel Jones, Senior Lecturer, University of Dundee, Scotland
Author of Irigaray: Toward a Sexuate Philosophy (Cambridge Polity 2011)
Title: Between Nancy and Cavarero: Birth Death and the Singular Limits of the Political

Organisers:
Nick Aldridge, MMU, n.aldridge@mmu.ac.uk
Joanna Hodge, MMU j.hodge@mmu.ac.uk
Henry Somers Hall, MMU, h.somers-hall@mmu.ac.uk
Dr. David Webb, University of Staffordshire, d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk

Monday 2 January 2012

Candle March for Anuj Bidve, 6-9pm, 2/2/12

Info here

"There's Still 98% to Go"

New article on the occupy movement by Dr Sunil Manghani, who gave a talk to the Graduate Programme in 2010 based on his book Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.



Sunil reflects on the ways in which the occupy movements have failed to gain traction in the undergraduate body...