The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates. Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals. However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about ‘impact’. So, she’d found out about the institutional regime of … Continue reading
We convened in Brussels, for a colloquium on transnationalism in Hispanic cinema, on the eve of the latest European summit. The juxtaposition was ironic and not irrelevant. On one side of town, the leaders of European transnationalism grappling with the … Continue reading
In 2002 the Cuban filmmaker Fernando Pérez made a compelling documentary called Suite Habana which portrayed the melancholic mood of the Cuban capital at the start of the 21st century. Ten years later the mood is rather different, as I … Continue reading
Maastricht provided a suitably quiet setting for an international workshop on ‘Soundscapes of the urban past’, which covered the behaviour of audition across different forms — radio, film, theatre, plus new audio phenomena like car stereos and audio museum guides … Continue reading
Events since the near-death experience of finance capital in 2008 have succoured renewed attention not to Marxism as a political creed but to Marx as the urtext of the proper analysis of the capitalist system. On the one hand, old … Continue reading
The Thesis Whisperer 22/02/2012 Academic publishing is presented as a universal good, without regard to how the publishing system operates. While publications are an essential addition to the CV in today’s competitive job market, the ethics of publishing need to be considered too. … Continue reading
Interesting discussion going on recently over on Film-Philosophy about that old bugbear, the relation of theory to practice in our teaching and study of film. This debate has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the … Continue reading
After my rather long silence, an uncharacteristically short post. We gathered, on an unusually warm day for January, at the London College of Communication in Elephant & Castle for the third seminar convened by the Artists’ Moving Image Research Network, … Continue reading
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33123752[/vimeo]
The world represented by the mainstream media is still governed by a division into centre and periphery which has been thrown into doubt by recent events—not only the global effects of economic crisis, but the popular protest movements which have … Continue reading