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The boy can’t help it: Little Richard’s disruption and re-construction of screen performativity
No full textAs both “…the architect of rock and roll,” and the archetypal rock and roller, Little Richard’s genre-defining performance of sound and self in the studio, on stage and on screen repeatedly sets and transgresses the boundaries of performativity within popular music and popular culture.
In cinema appearances which include lip-synching to his music in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), portraying a slowly exploding music producer in Down and Out in Beverley Hills (1986), and voicing his own cartoon cameo for television’s The Simpsons (2002), Little Richard’s screen performance collapses performer, persona and protagonist into an expressive mode which draws on, defies and so re-defines our understanding of pop stars-as-actors.
This essay examines the cultural impact of Little Richard as a multi-media stylistic originator and disruptor, with a specific focus on screen-based dimensions of his musical influence and performance legacy
They Play
No full textThe output is a book section in which Bottomley investigates queer and feminist perspectives in the communication design of football. The writing focuses on the role of non-professional designers and DIY design within grassroots football spaces. The essay sits amongst a broad range of essays by designers, architects and academics who each explore how design has shaped the story of football. Research methods employed include interviewing football fans and DIY designers and visual analysis of archival material. Due to the broad intended audience of the book, a history of women’s football was introduced to contextualise the writing, before weaving interviews, and contemporary design with the limited amount of archival material available in this area. New knowledge created in this output sits within the cross-disciplinarity of design and football. Bottomley's contribution provides new knowledge by investigating the communication design of football through queer and feminist lenses
The Industrialisation of Animation Education
No full textThis chapter explores the pressure on animation courses to produce highly skilled, technically proficient graduates who are ‘ready for industry’ and the pressure that this places on students to be technically excellent upon completion of their studies.
This presents a problem for academics, as there is only a finite amount of time to enable students to understand approaches to becoming a creative practitioner, develop a specialist practice and acquire practical, technical and effective communication skills. The emphasis that industry representatives place on purely technical skills presents issues for courses who are, at the same time, enabling students to become independent thinkers and innovators who can function creatively within their chosen discipline to a high level. The purpose of this chapter is to bring this discussion to the fore and explore the impact it has on students’ approaches to their education
Music Theory in Higher Education: The Language of Exclusion?
No full textThis study analyses the entry requirements for undergraduate higher education music courses. This shows how high-level music theory skills and instrumental grade attainment relating to theoretical understanding of score notation can be a barrier to music higher education.
It is argued that modes of institutional capital relating to theoretical music skills represent an exclusive and excluding form of implicit discrimination. This leads to unrepresentative populations within HE music programmes and onwards into the music profession.
Through an ontological justification of Western art music, and the corresponding ‘grammar’ of music theory, as a language, the nature of exclusivity implied by these entry requirements is identified. It is proposed that music theory requirements result in severe marginalisation of aspirant young musicians who do not ‘speak’ the ‘correct’ language, as defined by institutional and professional gatekeepers. The socio-economic culture of music education becomes fixed in elitism through this narrowing of the ‘language of access’. The intersectionality between race and class exists to compound the elitism of modes of musical language, further ensuring ‘what music is’ is decided by unrepresentative groups. Suggestions are proposed of what music departments can do to widen access and participation, moving towards a broader definition of musical literacy and the theoretical tools applied to a more diverse range of musical objects
‘Performance’ Measures as Neoliberal Industrialisation of Higher Education: A Policy Archaeology of the Teaching Excellence Framework and Implication for the Marginalisation of Music Education
Full text linkInstrumental measures pledging to assess the ‘quality’ of education represent the latest turn in the unabating neoliberalisation of the UK education sector. As the proliferation of league tables, accountancy measures and ‘common-sense’ rhetoric around ‘value for money’ become normalised, the education sector continues to transform into a site of battle; a hierarchical competition of economic Darwinism. Higher education has not been immune to this seemingly irresistible cultural hegemony, embracing its own system of valuation, validation and competition through adoption of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Conducting a Policy Archaeology (Scheurich, 1994), I seek to show that the TEF embeds a neoliberal governmentality, aimed at entrenching marketisation and industrialisation at the expense of teaching excellence. Through exploration of the policy’s inception, the TEF can be viewed as an apparatus of industrialisation and represents one within a consort of educational policies which seek to devalue music education
Porto Marghera: working class environmentalism
No full textThe output is a chapter in an edited book through which Tsionki has discussed long-term consequences of industrial activity in Porto Marghera, Venice. The process involved research into the historical and socio-political conditions around the development of the industrial zone and a closer look into working-class movement and Operaismo (Workerism). In a misperceived safe distance from the historic city of Venice, the industrial complex of Porto Marghera was developed in the 1920s focusing primarily on the petrochemical sector. Throughout the years the zone saw exponential growth resulted in a detrimental destruction of the surrounding ecosystem (non-human and human-workers, inhabitants). In the 1990s strict environmental regulations were introduced to reduce soil and groundwater contamination but despite the restrictions the lagoon is still affected by nonbiodegradable pollutants, which contribute to the accumulation of phytoplankton blooms and in turn can cause major environmental problems. This essay discusses the impact of modernity and industrialisation in the area touching on issues of toxicity, health and labour conditions while challenging the notion of economic progress. The essay focuses on working class environmentalism, a term that is not widely discussed within the historical analysis of trade unions, with an important contribution around the way Operaismo and the labour movement in Italy incorporated environmentalism as part of their major demands. The essay is published as part of the Venice and the Anthropocene: an ecocritical guide
Creative Consumption: Art About Eating on Instagram
No full textThis chapter explicates how Instagram has figured as a site, subject, and medium in our respective and collaborative art practices. Instagram, and specifically food on Instagram, is still a relatively unexplored subject within art practice. [Im]moral Food (Woolley & Worth, 2019), Wishbook (Woolley, 2015-), A drawing made by cutting up my body weight in celery (Celery Drawing) (Worth, 2016-17) and FEED (Worth, 2017) explore cultural and gender politics attached to photographs of food on Instagram. The selected works are underpinned by a concern with the ideological imperatives attached to certain raw foods and food commodities, and how these rhetorics are exploited and ‘shared’ by brands and individuals on Instagram. The role of accompanying hashtags will also be explored: how they sparingly dictate approved behaviours, also serving to affirm allegiances with virtual communities bound by these shared values through incantation like repetition of use.
Through a collection of appropriated Instagram posts [Im]Moral Food illustrates popular binaristic divisions of food into “good” or “bad”, such as posts using #cleaneating and #eatdirty. The resulting slideshow demarcates the visual identity and linguistic tropes attached to contemporary moralising rhetoric around food, which has become a mainstay of social media platform Instagram’s pictorial oeuvre. The quasi-religious undertones of such content and the food commodities featured will also be explored in relation to Woolley’s Wishbook. In Wishbook individual commodities are presented to highlight gendered ideologies implicit in commercial branding practices on Instagram. Identity and morality attached to food will also be discussed in comparison to Celery Drawing which examines the ideologies attached to raw foods as opposed to food commodities. The chapter will close with a reflection on FEED; a literal representation of the consumption of identity through the ingestion photographs of consumables, which emphasises the divorce between food and bodily nourishment which occurs when photos of food are shared on Instagram
Revisiting Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual: A Roundtable for Perspectives on Academic Activism
Full text linkIn this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993) as a departure for examining how and where academic activism can take place. This is situated both within and apart from existing public struggles, including #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) and other current movements. Academic activism will be explored as an intellectual project that may at times problematise notions of the public, the intellectual, and the activist.
We will examine how academic activism contributes to activist projects, while also interrogating how “public” representational claims are made. This includes important questions: who is responsible for publics that are not yet constituted as such? What voices are not yet heard, seen, or understood? And what is the role of academic activists in relation to these? This in turn raises ethical questions of how to represent and be accountable to the disadvantaged and/or subaltern.
In addressing these issues, the roundtable will explore activism both inside and outside the classroom, offering various figurations of academic activism. The discussion will draw on the participants’ experiences of university teaching and popular education within local contexts, as members of staff at Birmingham City University in the UK
The Janus of the Access to HE Diploma: Rethinking qualifications, units, credits and levels
No full textThis chapter explores the impact the underpinning thinking around credit accumulation and transfer had on the Access to HE Diploma (AHED). At the time of writing AHED courses are validated by Access Validation Agencies (AVAs). The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) licences the AVAs across England and Wales (Busher, James and Suthill 2012; DfE 2020).
Policy documents and reflections from students, access managers and educators were analysed to understand the strengths and weaknesses of unitised curricula and to what extent they enable access to higher education. The flexibility and responsiveness to adults’ needs of unitisation, credit value, and credit level are reconsidered within the context of the AHED.
It is argued that although Access education and the unitisation of curricula are seen by many as supporting adult learning and widening participation, there are tensions and contradictions that have never been resolved. This has resulted in a qualification which, for some, is overly complex, bureaucratic and heavily assessed
Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design
No full textGraphics have a way of living that is often awkward and unplanned. We see it when they are ripped from walls, littered on streets and faded in shop windows. We wouldn’t say they are that way by design, however this everyday difference between graphics and their designs is underimagined in critical discourses. Graphic Events intensifies this difference in a montage of original essays and interviews that coax graphics into unfamiliar dialogues