The more data we have, the less we can trust it. This is certainly true in the case of IMDb, the so-called movie database that is increasingly used by students and educators alike. Superficially, it has a history that shouts ‘trust me’: founded by a British film fan Col Needham before the World Wide Web even existed, it lived at one time on Cardiff University’s servers. Though later acquired and monetised by Amazon, Needham remains in charge.
In 2016, several UK universities regrettably adopted the use of trigger warnings to signal ‘potentially disturbing’ material on course syllabi.
Having recently returned to work after several weeks off work because of anxiety and clinical depression, it seems appropriate to write about a ‘trending’ topic: mental health, mental illness, its representations in popular media, and how all of these affect staff and students in universities. I am referring here to my own experience working in a UK institution of HE but I’m sure some aspects of the situation apply elsewhere.
A while ago, Martin Barker invited scholars to discuss the potential for the re-incorporation of Marxist ideas into audience studies. For a short time, a group of us discussed via email how Marxism might be re-introduced to the study of audiences. But very quickly, the group fell silent, largely, I assume as a result of our workloads that kept us from fully engaging in the discussion.
How do we write using the audiovisual? Many of us are facing this challenge, frustrated by the restrictions of prose-only analyses. One answer is the audiovisual essay, in its poetic and analytic variants. These have recently taken off in the UK, especially in film studies, as a result of the significant loosening of copyright law, which now explicitly allows quotation of audiovisual works for the purposes of critical comment and review.
A few weeks ago, I attended the annual MeCCSA conference, held at the University of Leeds. A dominant strand of the event centred around contemporary working cultures in the creative industries, with presentations on precarity, issues of diversity and equality within the sector and the psychological implications of ‘failure’ to name but a few.
Summer in New Zealand has been particularly crap so far this year (storms and flooding), so my beloved and I had to travel to the Pacific Island nation of Samoa, in search of sun, some four hours on a plane heading north into the Pacific. I also had another purpose: a significant birthday fell on January 9 th and I wanted to be Where Nobody Knew My Name.
I am often asked for my recommendations on what works in terms of teaching television at HE level. It’s not exactly the right time of the academic year for this, but here are some of the things I’ve learned from teaching television on undergraduate degree courses in the UK over the years.
There is a quote I have used in my first year Media Cultures course, when I address the opening topic ‘Why study the media?’ I cannot recall where I first read it but I have always attributed it to French cultural theorist Roland Barthes. But now I am troubled that I cannot find a source for his words of advice, To be a critic one also needs to be a fan. Perhaps he never wrote such words. Maybe someone else did.
Question: What do the popular sci-fi television series’ Farscape (1999-2003) and Orphan Black (2013 – ) have in common? Answer: Neither featured in my undergraduate class ‘Science Fiction on Television’, but I can explain – I think.
