Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Arts Week 2013

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By Professor Hilary Fraser, Dean of Arts

 

Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

Arts Week 2013 promises to be our best yet. For the first time we are able to make full use of the dedicated new exhibition and performance spaces completed this year, thanks to the generosity of our alumni, to showcase the exciting research and teaching carried out by the School of Arts. This year our focus is on theatre, as we celebrate the launch of our state-of-the-art practice and performance space with a series of public performances featuring work by students and teachers on our theatre and creative writing programmes and Research Fellows associated with Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre. Highlights include artist Tom Lyall’s one-man science fiction epic DEFRAG_, and Andrew McKinnon’s staging of Martin Lewton’s Handel’s Cross, fresh from its world première in Dublin. Audiences are invited to participate in panel discussions on the sensory world of Renaissance theatre (with colleagues from the Globe, with whom Birkbeck offers an innovative MA), on voluntary labour in the arts, and on adaptations of film texts for the theatre.

Birkbeck’s long-standing reputation for field-defining research and teaching in film has been given a new platform with the launch of the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI), under the Directorship of Laura Mulvey, earlier this year. Our award-winning cinema is the venue for a varied programme of screenings and discussions with practitioners, including experimental film-makers John Smith, Mark Lewis and Birkbeck alumna Emma-Louise Williams, and writers David Campany and Michael Rosen. Films shown encompass locations and cultures as different as Hackney and Brazil, reflecting our diverse expertise in screen studies, from local London-based film to world cinema. The visual arts are also celebrated in a talk by Tate Britain curator Martin Myrone, who will discuss the Sublime as spectacle in relation to recent exhibitions on the Gothic and on John Martin.

The School’s new arts space, the Peltz Room, is the setting for a number of readings, discussions, performances and exhibitions that take place throughout the week, show-casing how Birkbeck leads the field in practice-based research in the arts. And our other beautifully restored heritage room, the Keynes Library, plays host to a series of literary panels and discussions. Visitors will have an opportunity to find out about our programmes in dance and music, and also to learn about creative writing at Birkbeck, through the Writers’ Hub Hubbub event, and a panel on ‘Getting Published in the Digital Age’. Birkbeck lecturer in creative writing, Richard Hamblyn, author of The Art of Science (2011), will chair a symposium on science and writing, and two guided tours, one of Bloomsbury’s Squares and the other themed around urban media, offer a literal take on our sense of the School as a constellation of the arts at the heart of a vibrant city with which it is always connected. Arts Week will end, like many an evening at Birkbeck after classes, in the pub, with a pre-match panel on literature and football at the College Arms. All in all, it promises to be a wonderful week for the arts. And who will win this year’s competition, on Bloomsbury Squares?

Hilary Fraser
Dean of Arts

The Networked Academic: Social Media and your Research Identity

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This post was contributed by Ceren Yalcin, Nelly Ali and Mayur Suresh, interns at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

Twitter, Facebook, Academia.edu, Youtube, Pinterest, Delicious, Foursquare and many more…The list of available digital platforms is long, but what is the value of social media for academics?

Dr Scott Rodgers, lecturer in Media Theory at Birkbeck College, spoke yesterday about what academics can do with and in social media. He suggested that we should think of social media, a networked media, not as just as a form of ‘networking’. Rather than looking at it as an arena in which we make contacts and disseminate our work and view the work of others, he suggested we look at social media as a different sort of academic environment that develops its own intertia and channels the production of knowledge. The structural logic of social media enables different methods and forms of academic knowledge. In his talk Dr Rodgers presented a variety of popular social media platforms and discussed what sort of academic life each one of these seemed to produce.

The speaker pointed out several things that make social media different from ordinary sites of knowledge production. First that social media is persistent, in the sense that there is automatic recording of whatever you post and this stays online for a long time. Second, replicability. Meaning that once something is posted online, people can, almost instantaneously, make copies and further post it. This leads to the third characteristic: scalability. By posting and reposting by multiple users, there is the collective amplification of material that is posted online. And lastly, searchability. The fact that material that is posted online is persistent, allows for it to be searchable.

When the speaker asked the audience to comment on their own use of social media, one participant pointed out that her activities on Twitter resulted in a successful, international research co-operation. Others stated that they found Academia.edu especially useful as it allows users to share papers and to receive feedback on work in progress. However, there were also some mixed feelings towards social media amongst the participants. One participant said that tweeting during a conference might be good publicity for the event but she found that it also made her less concentrated and distracted from the actual conference talks. Another interesting account came from an academic who pointed out how ‘addictive’ social media can be and how it can prevent doing other and more important work. Further, the discussants commented on the conflicts online profiles may cause. Here, a few participants expressed concern that their work and personal personae may meet, potentially causing embarrassment (we’ve all been there!).

Dr Rodgers pointed out some of the concerns and hopes he had for a networked academia. Some of the concerns included the fragmentation of writing (how do you get a theoretical argument to fit into a tweet?), the need to get as much posted as often as possible, and the view that being logged into these new forms was just another form of academic labour – that in addition to publishing and speaking, maintaining an online persona was another things academics, particular early career researchers, needed to do to. On the plus side, he hoped that new media would engender less formalized forms of academic expression, more honest and generous academia, and a (differently) publicly engaged academia.

“Style Hitler!”

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This post was contributed by Ruth Harriss, a student on  Birkbeck’s MA History of Art.

Dr Despina Stratigakos, ‘Domesticating Hitler: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Führer’s Private Spaces‘, Friday 8 March 2013, hosted by the Architecture, Space and Society Network, School of Arts, Birkbeck.

Before attending Dr. Despina Stratigakos’ talk, it had never crossed my mind that one might think of Adolf Hitler as an individual who possessed impeccable taste – as someone who lived in comfortable, stylish interiors that reflected a refined artistic sensibility.  However I learned how this image of the German chancellor, expertly crafted by his talented interior designer Gerdy Troost, was used with great effect to distance Hitler from the violent crimes he committed across Europe.  In fact Hitler’s ‘domesticated’ persona was so compelling that unbelievably, merely a year after the devastation of Guernica in 1937, his mountain retreat in Obersalzberg was esteemed in the British magazine Homes & Gardens.

The Berghof at Obersalzberg

The Berghof at Obersalzberg. Photo: L. Ammon

Drawing upon research carried out for her upcoming book Hitler at Home, Despina Stratigakos discussed both the Berghof at Obersalzberg and Hitler’s Munich apartment on Prinzeregentenplatz as important and influential ‘backstage’ spaces to the Fuhrer’s public campaigns and performances.  Although only the cultural and economic elite would actually cross the threshold of either residences, their locations and the photographs of the Berghof that were circulated in the media both embedded Hitler into a specifically German context of art and culture as well as representing his vision of an Aryan super state.

Of particular interest was the argument that the Hitler/Troost design partnership forged an instantly recognizable National Socialist vernacular that undermines the ‘bombast’ of Fascist aesthetics that already dominates much of the scholarship.  On the whole Art History has tended to devaluate and disregard the influence of the domestic sphere and consequently Hitler’s private spaces remains unexplored territory.  However I expect that Hitler at Home will apply more than just a fresh lick of paint to the previously overlooked domestic profile of Adolf Hitler and not least in its recovery of Gerdy Troost from beneath the rubble of kitsch Nazi paraphernalia.

Cinema and Human Rights Days

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This post was contributed by Dr Emma Sandon, Lecturer in Film and Television, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

What is the impact of cinema in raising public awareness of human rights? Can films about human rights make a difference and promote political change? These are some of the questions that the Cinema and Human Rights Days addressed at the Gordon Square cinema, Birkbeck, on 15 and 16 March. Timed to coincide with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, Birkbeck hosted a debate on human rights cinema, a screening of Salma and a Q & A with the documentary film director, Kim Longinetto, and heard John Biaggi, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival director and Nick Fraser, the BBC commissioning editor of Storyville, talk about their promotion of human rights films and programmes.

John Biaggi talked about how important it was that ‘good’ human rights films were selected for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and he explained how that criteria was arrived at, whilst Nick Fraser, in his discussion of the importance of storytelling for any programme that television commissioned, admitted that ‘the spectacle of injustice is always gripping’. Rod Stoneman, former commissioning editor at Channel 4 and director of the Irish Film Board, presented a timely discussion and screening, in the week that Hugo Chavez died, of Chavez: Inside the Coup (also entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised|) (2003), a film that caused media controversy when it was screened on the BBC and which was turned down by the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver for being biased in favour of Chavez. Participants then watched the Human Rights Watch Film Festival screening of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s film, Fatal Assistance (Haiti/France/US, 2012), an indictment of the international community’s post- earthquake disaster intervention and the failure of current aid policies and practices. The screening was followed by a discussion with the director at the ICA.

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, from Birkbeck’s School of Law, and I asked participants to consider the politics of human rights discourse in film. What is a human rights film? How has the notion of a human rights film emerged? Can we talk about a history of human rights cinema? How are human rights films selected, promoted and circulated through film festivals, broadcasting, cinema theatrical release, dvd sales and internet distribution? What are the criteria by which a human rights film is judged?

I discussed how the human rights film has been constituted by human rights film festivals, first set up in the late 1980s and 1990s by human rights organisations, to promote human rights advocacy. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival and the Amnesty International Film Festival (now Movies that Matter), the two largest of such initiatives, then established the Human Rights Film Network in 2004, to ‘promote the debate on the ethics, professional codes of conduct and other standards regarding human rights film making.’ The charter of this network seeks to promote films that are ‘truthful’ and that have ‘good cinematographic quality’. It is these criteria of style and taste that become politically charged in the process of commissioning, selecting and curating films. If we look at a range of examples, it becomes clear that the subjects of human rights films are constituted in specific ways. However the way in which film represents human rights and engages viewers and audiences are complex. It is important that we understand the effects of the different audio and visual narrative and rhetorical devices used in films, be they feature films, documentary, newsreel, essay films, community or advocacy video.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera reflected on the dimension of political agency shown in films that represent revolutionary struggle in Latin America. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Story of a Death Untold, The Coup against Allende, 9/11/1973, and screening clips from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s, Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo) (Cuba, 1968) and Patricio Guzmán’s documentary, Battle of Chile (La Batalla de Chile) (Cuba, 1975, 1976, 1979), he weaved a layered narrative of the human potential for change. These important political films engage with the portrayal of what he termed the ‘discourse of anxiety’ and the ‘discourse of tenacity and courage’ in relation to people’s belief in the possibilities of social transformation and their ability to fight for freedom. These films are also tributes as well as memorials to those who have struggled for real social and political change.

The event was the result of a collaboration between Birkbeck, the University of Galway and Middlesex University and was supported by Open Society Foundations. The organisers hope to run this event in conjunction with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival again next year at Birkbeck.

The podcasts of this event are available on the School of Arts website.