Research news and events
Tracking Loach
In December, David Archibald was interviewed by WBAI 99.5 FM radio in New York. In the interview, he discusses his recent monograph, Tracking Loach: Politics | Practices | Production, his work on Ragged Cinema with Núria Araüna Baró, and the attempt to create a history of Glasgow in song with The Tenementals, a group of academics and musicians. A full transcript of the interview was subsequently published in Culture Matters. (February 2024)
Ragged Cinema
In December, the 44th edition of the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (International Festival of New Latin American Cinema) hosted a major symposium on ‘Cine Dialógico (Dialogical Cinema). The symposium, which was led by the prominent Cuban filmmaker, Lizette Vila, brought together a range of speakers from Cuban film culture, and feminist filmmaking activists in four historically-related cities: Glasgow, which is twinned with Havana, and Vilanova i la Geltrú (Catalunya), which is twinned with Matanzas (Cuba). The project, coordinated by Núria Araüna Baró (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) and David Archibald (University of Glasgow) under the banner ‘Ragged Cinema’, is exploring how no-budget filmmaking might be utilised to develop creative conversations with feminist activists and academics at distance. The project is funded by grants from British Academy and AHRC, supported by local authorities in Glasgow and Vilanova i la Geltrú and a diverse range of Cuban organisations, including Afrofeminist Articulation, Matanzas Association for the Deaf, Trans Cuba, Casa Africa and Karibuni. Five films in process related to the project were also screened at the festival. A [Spanish-language] news report on the symposium is available. (February 2024)
Keynote: Imagine Fantastic Film Festival
Imagine Fantastic Film Festival is held annually in Amsterdam. In October 2023, the festival dedicated a program called "The Unveiled Revolt: Monsters, Myths, and Power in Iranian Genre Cinema" - in honour of the ongoing women led movement of Iran. Zahra Khosroshahi was invited to deliver the keynote, contextualising the programme thinking about the intersections of gender and genre. (January 2024)
New Book: Mapping Innovation in India’s Creative Industries
Rohit Dasgupta has a forthcoming book, Mapping Innovation in India’s Creative Industries from Routledge. This is the first in depth study of the Indian creative industries providing a comprehensive mapping of the creative sector and policy landscape with detailed case studies of specific sectors, geographic regions and governance structures. (November 2023)
New Publication: Michel Serres and the Philosophy of Technology
Michel Serres and the Philosophy of Technology As part of his ongoing project on the philosophy of Michel Serres and technology, Tim Barker has published a new essay entitled ‘Michel Serres and the Philosophy of Technology’ in Theory, Culture and Society (Volume 40, No. 6). In the essay, Tim starts to develop a new perspective through which to read Serres, through the perspective of technology. Tim argues that Serres’ work offers a novel philosophy of technology, specifically around the relation of technology to humanism. Although a great deal has been said about Serres’ treatment of parasitic relations, noise, interdisciplinarity and communication, little has been written about his approach to questions of technology. Addressing this, Tim shows how Serres offers entirely new ways to think about how we might live with emerging technologies, how they change our status as humans and how pedagogy and our theories of what it being in the world need to change in response. (November 2023)
New Book and D&I Targets Book Club
Professor Doris Ruth Eikhof has published a new book, Diversity & Inclusion: Are We Nearly There Yet? Target Setting In the Screen Industries. The book explains how to use targets to improve diversity and inclusion (D&I), in the screen industries and beyond. Based on extensive research and analysis of current industry practice, it discusses how to set D&I targets, what to use them for and why it is important to look at diversity and inclusion separately. The book also analyses some of the more problematic aspects of counting people and limiting our imagination to percentage figures. Are We Nearly There Yet? is available Open Access.
The AHRC IAA-funded D&I Targets Book Club is a free to attend series of lunchtime online meetings for industry practitioners and policy makers. Join in to discuss chapters of the book and hear from industry peers.
Japanese Cinema Playlist - Learning on Screen
David Martin-Jones has recently completed a further curated Box of Broadcasts playlist, this time on Japanese Cinema, for Learning on Screen.
He is currently completing an associated set of learning resources based on the playlist, for publication later this year. (September 2023)
Jury Membership
Dimitris Eleftheriotis has been invited to be a member of the Jury of the 2023 Athens Short Film Festival (September 2023).
RSE Award: Graduate Attributes for the Scottish Film & TV Industries
A team of colleagues in FTV, led by Prof Amy Holdsworth, have been funded by the RSE to investigate the ways in which critical, ethical and creative thinking is valued, embraced and applied in the Scottish film and television industries through the skills and attributes of graduates. Within a context of real-world demands for a skilled screen sector workforce the research project will explore the mutual benefits of collaboration between industry and HEIs to jointly address the challenges of recruitment and retention, and related issues of access and inclusion.
The three planned workshops will open a space for preliminary research and consultation on the alignment of the skills and professional qualities that the industry requires with graduate attributes and skills that research-led Universities can offer. In doing so, this project seeks to find a way to better support graduates entering the screen industries in order to prepare them for employment, to empower them as citizens, to be ambassadors for higher education and to help shape the future of Scottish film and television.
New Publication: Time and Unplayable Games
Tim Barker has published a new essay titled ‘Time and Unplayable Games’ in KunstTexte. In this piece Tim looks at some recent independent video games that are designed specifically not to be played. These games – special types of cultural objects that he refers to as ‘anti-games’ - resist interaction, provide obstacles to play and block the usual experiences attributed to more traditional video games. The essay uses these games to explore issues around access, exclusion, technology and the temporality of contemporary digital culture. (September 2023)
Annual Film and Television Studies Research Symposium
In September, Film and Television Studies held their first annual FTV Research Symposium, designed to showcase the current work going on in the department. Featured throughout the day were papers from Sarah Neely, Rohit Dagupta, Tim Barker and Michael Bachmann, Kevin Guyan, Sophia Weddington, Doris Ruth Eikhof & Christina Williams, Mhairi Brennan and Kirsten Aitkins, on diverse topics from experimental films, queer film festivals in India, video games, to UK Film and Television Equity Policies and the BBC coverage of the Scottish Referendum. (September 2023)
International Fellowships
Rohit Dagupta has been awarded a funded CARGC (Centre for Advanced Research in Global Communication) Visiting Fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania to spend a month (January- February 2024) at the Annenberg School of Communication to conduct research and participate in scholarly activities. He will follow this up with a McGannon Fellowship at Fordham University where he will be based between February- March 2024 organising a seminar on race, sexuality and digital culture.
International Visiting Scholar
During his research leave, David Martin-Jones has been invited to attend the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of British Columbia, Canada. At both institutions he engages with faculty and students, discussing in particular his world on a world of cinemas, and presenting his latest research for his forthcoming monograph with Bloomsbury, Cinematic Transculturation: "Floating Heritage" Films in the Twenty-First Century. (August 2023)
New book: Contemporary Screen Ethics
David Martin-Jones has recently published a co-edited collection of film-philosophy on Contemporary Screen Ethics.
It focuses on the intertwining of the ethical with the socio-political, considering such topics as: care, decolonial feminism, ecology, histories of political violence, intersectionality, neoliberalism, race, and sexual and gendered violence.
The anthology includes analysis of a diverse range of examples, including films, television and a number of other screen media: intersectional feminist ethics (from the housemaid in Brazilian “Big House” dramas to Carol Morley documentaries); the human/nature dichotomy in John Akomfrah’s art installations and Bong Joon-ho’s “superpig” thriller Okja; race in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us and Luisa Omielan’s stand-up comedy on BBC television; the memory of traumatic Cold War pasts in The Look of Silence (Indonesia) and Though I am Gone (China); Nina Wu’s exploration of rape culture in the film industry; and the digital visuality of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s virtual reality experience Carne y arena.
This collection seeks to contribute to the decolonizing of thinking by including scholars from various continents discussing screen media from around the world, analysed through engagement with thinkers not typically thought of when considering screen ethics (e.g. María Lugones, Françoise Vergès, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks, José Esteban Muñoz) (June 2023)
Screening and interview
Zahra Khosroshahi joined the CCA to bring to Glasgow an incredible film by intersectional feminist filmmaker Mania Akbari both in celebration of the Persian New Year, Norooz, and in support and solidarity with this revolutionary moment in Iran!
The cinematic output of Iranian women show us how they’ve always been engaged in and at the forefront of debates and protests. In this deeply intimate work, Akbari turns to her own body, drawing on the connection between the personal and the political.
This event was made possible through the financial support of UofG Culture & Creative Arts.
You can watch the pre-recorded interview between Zahra Khosroshahi and the filmmaker. (March 2023)
New feature film
Being in A Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait, a new feature film by Luke Fowler, co-produced by Professor Sarah Neely, had its International Premiere at the Berlinale on the 17th of February. The film draws from Neely’s ongoing research on Tait and a 'fugitive archive’ consisting of Tait’s rushes and offcuts. Further festival screenings include Doc Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art (24 Feb), Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (5 March), Cinema Du Reel (25 March), Courtisane (30 March), European Media Art Festival (20 Apr), and Hot Docs, Toronto (28 Apr). While attending the Berlinale Neely was also supported by Screen Scotland to attend the European Film Market. (March 2023)
MAST article
Kirsten Adkins has a forthcoming journal article titled Who We Are: The Blurring of Gendered Subjectivities in 21st Century British Military Promotion. The article is due to be published at the end of April in the special edition Blurring Digital Media in MAST: Journal of Media Art Study and Theory. MAST's remit is to prioritise interdisciplinary and practice-led theory so very relevant to lots of the work we are doing in FTV. (March 2023)
Talk at University of California
David Martin-Jones was invited to give a research paper to the Media Studies programme at the University of California, Berkeley. He spoke about his recent book on Columbo. The talk emphasised in particular what this popular show from the late Twentieth Century can illuminate about neoliberalism and how it promotes attentive labour, alongside discussion of how exploring such a programme can refine existing ideas in Television Studies, such as those surrounding cult television. (February 2023)
Time magazine
In January 2023, David Martin-Jones was quoted in TIME Magazine in a piece discussing the continuing resonance of Columbo for contemporary television shows like Poker Face. (January 2023)
Award winning book
Amy Holdsworth’s On Living with Television (Duke University Press, 2021), was recently named ‘Monograph of the Year’ at the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Outstanding Achievement Awards. The book, which provides an auto-biographical account of the role of television in everyday life, was praised for its combination of the personal voice with critical and textual analysis to offer a “deeply thoughtful and engaging reading experience”. (October 2022)
Margaret Tait Exhibition
Sarah Neely has co-curated ‘Being in a Place - A Portrait of Margaret Tait’, an exhibition by Luke Fowler for Void Gallery in Derry, 10 Sept-10 Nov 2022. The exhibition features a selection of archival material and work by the late filmmaker and poet, Margaret Tait, as well as a new feature film portrait of Tait by Luke Fowler (co-produced by Neely), which takes inspiration from an unrealised script found in Tait’s archive. (September 2022)
Converge Awards 2022
Lisa Kelly, Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies, has been selected as a finalist for the Converge Awards 2022. Dr Kelly is the founder of Set Ready Safety, a digital app that aims to transform safety in the screen industries and will be competing in the Create Change Challenge for creative projects with a social purpose. Converge is Scotland’s largest company creation programme for the university sector with 28 finalists competing across four categories for over £300,000 of equity-free funding and start-up support. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in Edinburgh in early November. (September 2022)
ARC Roadshow
Lisa Kelly of Film and TV Studies was invited to speak about her innovation journey at the ARC Roadshow in Scotland. Dr Kelly was selected for the Aspect Research Commercialisation (ARC) Accelerator in 2021 for her venture Set Ready Safety, a digital safety app designed to improve the safety of new entrants and freelance crew in the screen industries. The first edition of the ARC Roadshow brought together 5 universities to explore how to generate impact at scale from research across Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (SHAPE). (August 2022)
New Book: Miscommunications out now in paperback
Professor Tim Barker’s and Dr Maria Korolkova’s (University of Greenwich) edited book Miscommunications: Errors, Mistakes, Media is now out in paperback with Bloomsbury.
What happens when communication breaks down? Is it the condition for mistakes and errors that is characteristic of digital culture? And if mistakes and errors have a certain power, what stands behind it?
To address these questions, this collection assembles a range of cutting-edge philosophical, socio-political, art historical and media theoretical inquiries that address contemporary culture as a terrain of miscommunication. If the period since the industrial revolution can be thought of as marked by the realisation of the possibilities for global communication, in terms of the telephone, telegraph, television, and finally the internet, Miscommunications shows that to think about the contemporary historical moment, a new history and theory of these devices needs to be written, one which illustrates the emergence of the current cultures of miscommunication and the powers of the false.
The essays in the book chart the new conditions for discourse in the 21st century and collectively show how studies of communication can be refigured when we focus on the capacity for errors, accidents, mistakes, malfunctions and both intentional and non-intentional miscommunications. (August 2022)
Grant Success
Dr Rohit Dasgupta was awarded a UKRI Grant in February 2022 with colleagues at Loughborough University and Jindal Global University in India for the project ‘Overview and Mapping of the Creative Industries in India’. As part of the project they led a study on mapping India’s creative economy, undertaking policy review, interviews and a workshop in New Delhi. A comprehensive report is currently being co-authored. Rohit was also fortunate to have been awarded a RSE small grant in March 2022 for the project ‘Faith and Fashion in the South Asian Muslim Diaspora: Identity, Decoloniality and Consumption in Glasgow.’ Early parts of this research were presented at the American Sociological Association conference in August 2022. Further fieldwork is being carried out and a journal article based on the conference presentation is being drafted. (February - March 2022)
New Book: Columbo: Paying Attention 24/7
Prof David Martin-Jones published a new book about the cult favourite television series Columbo, with Edinburgh University, in November 2021.
What can explain why Columbo – in some ways a show ostensibly about a shabby workaholic – was and remains so popular with fans over so many decades (69 episodes from 1968 to 2003 – a huge cult following even to this day)? The book answers this question by exploring what makes Columbo such a good detective, by looking at his almost inhuman ability to pay attention to work 24/7. The memorable performance of Peter Falk as the absentminded but incisive sleuth is thus key to the book’s argument. Falk’s distinctive performance of the Lieutenant emphasises how we are encouraged to pay attention under late capitalism, a process which still resonates for our lives today. Drawing out how Columbo encourages us to attend to the world requires engagement with both the attention-seeking nature of television as a medium, as well as with theories of attention more broadly. Through such an analysis we can uncover much about society's transformation in recent decades, and indeed, how we are now expected to perform, learn, police, and situate ourselves in an all-surveilled world of 24/7 attention to screens. (November 2021)
Two videoessays on Columbo by David Martin-Jones are also available:
Columbo: On the Case 24/7
Columbo: Lessons in Looking
*In 2022, Columbo was shortlisted for the MeCCSA Best Monograph Prize.
New Publication: Michel Serres’ Messengers in Media Theory
Professor Tim Barker published a new essay addressing the philosophical figure of the messenger in Michel Serres’ work. The article is part of Barker’s larger project on Michel Serres and technologies of media and communication.
Although central to his philosophy of communication, the figure of the messenger in Michel Serres’ thought has so far received little attention in English speaking media and cultural theory. This essay explores the characters of messengers that Serres develops throughout his philosophical project, focusing on the way that they allow him to develop topics such as the ethics of exchange, interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, rituals of communication and what he sees as the violence of dialectics. The discussion of Serres’ work then leads to a discussion of the messenger figure in terms of the interruptions that they can introduce to systems of exchange, ending with an exploration of what Serres’ thought may offer as we try and grapple with a new culture of miscommunication. (November 2021)
Creative Scotland EDI Advisory Group
Professor Doris Ruth Eikhof has been appointed to Creative Scotland’s Advisory Group for Equality, Diversity & Inclusion. The Group will advise Creative Scotland on making arts, culture and creative industries more inclusive. Doris has been appointed alongside Sophie Amono, Barry Church-Woods, Michael Fellowes, Lewis Hou, Ashe Hussain, Cate Ross, Kerieva McCormick, Jim Muotune, Fadzai Mwakutuya, Kirin Saeed and Miss Annabel Sings. (February 2021)