Following the KCL Postgrad Film Studies Conference that I wrote about last week, I’ve been up to Glasgow for a similar event. In fact, two. The first was a workshop on documentary as research, with a focus on human rights and video activism. The panel I joined included folk from the Manchester collective Castles Built in Sand, the Glasgow Human Rights Film Festival, and Camcorder Guerrillas. Read more
What is going on, culturally speaking, when a person finds themself reading a classic text from say the 16th century, like Montaigne’s Essays, in the form of a 21st century electronic book?
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The following appears in ThreeD, Newsletter of the MeCCSA, No.16
In the view of Terry Eagleton, speaking recently to a protest meeting at LSE, ‘There are two incompatible and contradictory versions of education which are now fighting it out: the right wing version is education for the economy, the left wing version is education for society.’ (LSE, 18 January 2011; see On Campus at the New Statesman) Eagleton takes a long term view. When the humanities as we know them first emerged, he explains, they did so at exactly the same time as early industrial capitalism. Academia served as a space in which creative, imaginative and critical values expelled from early industrial capitalist society could take shelter, find nurture and flourish. Read more
We thought perhaps that we had seen everything on television you could possibly see. The Vietnam War. Famine in Africa. The images that return from history, of the Nazi concentration camps and the atom bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Airplane hijacks. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall. 9/11. The litany is substantial, and has expanded with the spread of consumer video and mobile phone cameras and what is loosely called citizen journalism. Read more