Calendar

The “gig economy” and new forms of flexible working now characterise work practices in an increasing number of fields beyond the digital sector and the creative industries. The number of self-employed workers in Britain has grown by 1 million between 2008 and 2015 (Office for National Statistics, 2016), while so-called “zero-hours contracts” have also reached a record high. This “uberification” of the workplace signals a transformation in labour relations and structures of employment that raises pressing questions about the future of work.

The workshop organised by the newly launched Policy Observatory of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster will examine the implications of this phenomenon for policy-making.

Focusing on the creative industries and beyond, the workshop will look at the impact of freelance work and precariousness on the social and economic well-being of workers, a critical issue for policy-making in the UK and internationally. The implications of the “gig economy” are currently under review by the UK government and a report is due in the autumn of 2017. As the UK Social Security Advisory Committee remarked in its 2014 study, while self-employment is significant for economic recovery, innovation and competitiveness, the relationship between self-employment and social security is very complex. Flexible employment has also been recently discussed in several Parliamentary Committees. Recent developments such as the ruling of the London Central Employment Tribunal in favour of the rights of Uber drivers in 2016, as well as the government’s proposal for a tax increase on the self-employed, which was postponed after considerable outcry, point to the increasing importance of policy debates around the “gig economy”.

The CAMRI Policy Observatory workshop aims to provide a platform for discussion about these issues that will bring together academics, policy-makers, civil society and industry.

Speakers will include Sally Gross and Dr George Musgrave from the University of Westminster who will reflect on the impact of the “gig economy” on mental health by drawing insights from their interdisciplinary study “Can Music Make You Sick? Working Conditions in the UK Music Industry”. Prof. Christian Fuchs will examine the causes of precarity in neoliberal capitalism from a macro-economic perspective. We are also very happy to welcome on the panel the guest speakers Eliza Easton, the Deputy Head of Research and Policy at the Creative Industries Federation, and Paul Gray, the Chairman of the Social Security Advisory Committee. The event will be chaired by Dr. Peter Goodwin.

Venue: Room C1.18 – Pavilion

University of Westminster
115 New Cavendish Street
London
W1W 6UW

Date and time: June the 13th, 2017.

16:00 – 17:30 panel debate and discussion with the audience;

17:30 – 19:00 networking drinks reception.

Part of Refugee Week

Conference organised by University of Westminster’s
Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)
Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM)
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Opening Ceremony: Thursday 22 June 2017 6-9pm
Conference: Friday 23 June 2017 9am-6pm & Saturday 24 June 2017 9:30am-1:30 pm
Film Festival: Saturday 24 June & Sunday 25 June 2017. Festival programme and tickets here.

According to UNHCR, globally there are now more than 65 million forcibly displaced persons, including 21 million refugees, who have left their homes as a result of conflict, persecution, famine, and environmental disasters. Meanwhile, migrants have also courageously left their homes of origin behind to voluntarily pursue a better life often motivated by freedom, education, economic opportunities or to reunite with family.

While many are tackling the topical challenges of migration and refugees few, if any, are addressing it from a cultural narrative or cultural rights perspective. The Rights and Might conference, organised by an interdisciplinary group of University of Westminster faculties representing media, art, design and social sciences, emphasises the need to amplify the voices and power of refugee and migrant narrativity while connecting dialogues and discussions to policies and inclusion/exclusion practices of host societies.

This conference offers a meaningful cross-cultural and interdisciplinary engagement with hitherto neglected refugee, migrant and exilic experiences presented through a film festival alongside theory, practice and policy discussions aimed at policymakers, academics and students, as well as to wider publics/citizens. It brings together international filmmakers, musicians, and artists who are involved in capturing and responding to individual stories of struggles and successes of individual migrants and refugees living and working in the UK, from the Georgian period to the present day, with policymakers, practitioners and academics working globally on migration and refugee issues.

Rights and Might encourages discussion of the hidden opportunities and unspoken challenges faced by migrants and refugees. The objective is to unravel little known personal and positive stories of migrants in changing contexts and to detail their agency, including their vital contributions to reshaping cultural landscapes and artistic expression.

The conference will consist of a keynote, a radio industry panel, 9 parallel panels, and artist presentations. There will also be a concurrent film festival held 24-25 June 2017 at Regent Street Cinema. The conference fee is £45, with a concessionary rate of £22 for students, which covers conference documentation, refreshments and administrative costs. Film festival passes and tickets for the individual films will be sold separately through the Regent Street Cinema box office. A Rights and Might Festival pass is available for £25 to the general public and £15 for conference registrants and individual tickets are £12 each regular price and £7.00 each for students and conference participants. The Sunday film shorts program 11:00am-3:30 pm is free to all.

Registration open until Sunday 18 June 2017.

Programme – Rights & Might

Rights & Might Film Festival details passes and tickets on sale on Regent Street Cinema website.

Presentation and lecture by distinguished broadcaster Kate Adie at Regent Street Cinema on Tuesday 27June 2017.

BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet has been named winner of this year’s prestigious British Journalism Review Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism. The Award is made each year in honour of one of the BBC’s most celebrated correspondents, the late Sir Charles Wheeler.

The annual award ceremony is hosted by the University of Westminster and will take place this year on 27 June at the University’s newly restored Regent Street Cinema. Presentation of the Award will be followed by a keynote speech from the distinguished broadcaster and author Kate Adie.

The Charles Wheeler Award, a collaboration between British Journalism Review and the University of Westminster, started in 2009 when the inaugural winner was Jeremy Paxman. It is presented each year by Sir Charles’ widow Lady Wheeler, accompanied by the Wheeler family.

Lyse Doucet began her BBC career reporting from west Africa in 1983, and for 15 years reported from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and across the Middle East . In 1999 she joined the BBC’s team of presenters on BBC World TV and World Service Radio. She played a key role in coverage of the Afghan and Iraq wars and was instrumental in the BBC’s reporting of the Arab Spring from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt as well as the Middle East conflict in Israel and Gaza. More recently, she has reported across the BBC on escalating conflicts, particularly in Syria. She has made two documentaries, Children of Syria (with Robin Barnwell, 2014) and Children of the Gaza War (with James Jones, 2015).

For further information or if you would like to attend, please contact:

Zsuzsanna Matyak

PR Officer, University of Westminster

Email: z.matyak1@westminster.ac.uk

Telephone:  020 7911 5862

The expansion of the digital economy has raised contentious issues for regulators and policy-makers. From the taxation of digital companies to the new business models associated with platform capitalism, to artificial intelligence, automation and the accountability of algorithms, regulators and policy-makers now have to contend with a rapidly changing economic environment. This panel discussion will reflect on current developments in the digital economy and their implications for policy. The event will bring together academics, policy-makers, civil society and industry. It will draw on the expertise of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) in the political economy of digital media and particularly on the work of Dr Mercedes Bunz on algorithms and automation, and of Dr Pieter Verdegem on Internet cooperatives. Guest speakers include Paul Morton, Tax Director at the Office of Tax Simplification, who will speak about the differences between digital and traditional economy, the international tax system and related challenges, Jim Killock, Executive Director, the Open Rights Group, and Will Hayter, Project Director at the Competition and Markets Authority, who will address the regulation and effectiveness of digital comparison tools.

Guest speakers:

Jim Killock, Executive Director, the Open Rights Group

Will Hayter, Project Director, the Competition and Markets Authority

Paul Morton, Tax Director, the Office of Tax Simplification

CAMRI speakers:

Dr Mercedes Bunz, Senior Lecturer

Dr Pieter Verdegem, Senior Lecturer

Venue: Room C1.52 (Small Lecture Theatre), University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street.

Date and Time:
29th of June, Thursday.
15:00 – 16:30 panel debate and discussion with the audience
16:30 – 18:00 networking drinks reception.

Please Register via Eventbrite

Conference organised by the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)

Keynote Panel

• Nancy Baym
• Emily Keightley
• Dave Morley (TBC)
• Tony D Sampson
• Paddy Scannell

This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine how and why everyday popular culture is produced and consumed on digital platforms. There is increasing interest in studying and discussing the linkages between popular cultural and social media, yet there exist important gaps when comparing such cultural phenomena and modes of consumption in a global, non-west-centric context. The conference addresses a significant gap in theoretical and empirical work on social media by focusing on the politics of digital cultures from below and in the context of everyday life. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, we seek to rethink digital viral cultures as ‘a whole way of life’; how ‘ordinary’, everyday digital acts can amount to forms of ‘politicity’ that can redefine experience and what is possible.

The conference will examine how social media users engage with cultural products in digital platforms. We will also be assessing how the relationship between social media and popular cultural phenomena generate different meanings and experiences.

The conference engages with the following key questions:

• How do online users in different global contexts engage with viral/popular cultures?
• How can the comparative analysis of different global contexts help us contribute to theorising emergent viral cultures in the age of social media?
• How do viral digital cultures redefine our experience of self and the world?

We welcome papers from scholars that will engage critically with particular aspects of online popular cultures. Themes may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Analysing viral media texts: method and theory
• Theorising virality: new/old concepts
• Rethinking popular culture in the age of social media
• Social media, politicity and the viral
• The political economy of viral cultures
• Memes, appropriation, collage, virality and trash aesthetics
• Making/doing/being/consuming viral texts
• Hybrid strategies of anti-politics in digital media
• Viral news/Fake news
• Non-mainstream music, protest, and political discussion
• Capitalism and viral marketing

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION

This one-day conference, taking place on Wednesday, 13th of September 2017, will consist of a keynote panel and panel sessions. The fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, will be £40, with a concessionary rate of £15 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs.

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS

The deadline for abstracts is Monday 10 July 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by Monday 17 July of 2017. Abstracts should be 250 words. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal address, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Please send all these items together in a single Word file, not as pdf, and entitle the file and message with ‘CAMRI 2017’ followed by your surname. The file should be sent by email to Events Coordinator Karen Foster at har-events@westminster.ac.uk

With digital media offering new affordances for documentation as well as new vulnerabilities, how can we capture the social lives of protest? In her talk, Red Chidgey will introduce the notion of ‘protest memory ecologies’ to think through the interrelationships between protestors, archivists, journalists and digital media.

What kinds of methodologies are needed for tracking memory practices across diverse sites and contexts? How are political events brought into the archive and museum in near real time? Red’s presentation will draw on examples connected to the 2017 Women’s March, which saw global protests erupt on the first day of the US Trump administration.

Biography
Red Chidgey is a lecturer in Gender and Media at King’s College London. Her monograph, Feminist Afterlives, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, explores how political memories are made, circulated and re-activated across temporal bounds, offering a closer understanding of activist memory and its methods.

Book edited by Jacob Johanssen and Diana Garrisi (Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster)

Following on from the conference ‘Different Bodies: (Self-) Representation, Disability and the Media’ which was held at the University of Westminster in June, we are preparing a book proposal based on some of the themes arising from the conference. The book proposal will be submitted to Peter Lang, who have already expressed a strong interest in the project.

The collection is intended to offer a comprehensive view of the relationship between disability and the media from a global and multidisciplinary perspective. Building upon existing studies, the book aims to explore if and how the rapidly changing technological means of communication are affecting how the body as strange, shameful, wrong, impaired, wounded, scarred, disabled, lacking, different or ‘other’ is constructed in the media. In particular the book aims to discuss whether the Internet has made it possible to develop new, alternative or more inclusive narratives that challenge long-established mainstream coverage of disability. Some of the questions we would like to address are, for example, whether self-representations of disability on the Internet are contesting or aligning with representations on mainstream media outlets. We would also like to look at issues such as the rise of disability hate crimes online, the relationship between journalism and disability awareness campaigns, online dating and disability, the media coverage of disability rights and employment. One of our aims is to establish the extent to which the media contribute to shape our relation with diversity in the digital era and, ultimately, our relationship with ourselves.

Possible themes include but are not limited to:
·         Affective labour of bodies
·         Auto-ethnographic accounts of the body in / through digital media
·         Celebrity bodies and the spectacles of transformation
·         Cinema and disability
·         Contemporary coverage of disability in print/online/television/radio
·         De-colonizing and de-westernising the mediated body
·         Disability and advertising
·         Disability and race
·         Disability and the media: historical perspectives
·         (Dis)Empowerments of the disabled body
·         Journalism and practices of othering the body
·         Neoliberalism, policy and austerity politics
·         Reality television and the body
·         Representing wounds and scars
·         Researching bodies and the media: frameworks and methodologies
·         Stigma and the body
–         Posthumanist and non-representational frameworks
·         The abject body
·         The body and trauma
·         The mediated body as spectacle
·         The medicalised body in the media
·         The objectification of the disabled body in the media

We invite submissions of 200-250 words chapter proposals. Deadline: 30 September 2017.
Submissions should also include:

a)            Title of chapter
b)            Author name/s, institutional details
c)            Corresponding author’s email address
d)            Keywords (no more than 5)
e)            A short bio

Commissioned chapters will be around 5,000 words. The fact that an abstract is accepted does not guarantee publication of the final manuscript. If the book proposal is approved, all chapters submitted will be judged on the basis of a double-blind reviewing process.

Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at D.Garrisi2@westminster.ac.uk and J.Johanssen@westminster.ac.uk

How does Scandinavia manage to delivered a notably high quality of life? In his talk introducing his most recent book, ‘Viking Economies’, Lakey combines historical analysis, economic data and interviews to find out that Norway has more start-ups per capita than the U.S., and Sweden outpaces the U.S. economy’s innovativeness and Denmark is racing ahead to achieve carbon neutrality.

But Nordic societies are not utopian. Racial and ethnic diversity challenges them. Women have not fully broken the “glass ceiling,” although they have 40% of corporate board seats and give significant political leadership. For brief periods Swedes, Icelanders, and Norwegians did de-regulate their financial sectors, with disastrous consequences that forced them back to their Nordic model. George Lakey’s researches how Scandinavian countries balance their struggles for democracy and freedom and how Scandinavia can be seen as a model others could learn from.

Viking Economics is published by Melville House, London & Brooklyn, paperback edition 2017 and was declared “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education.

Biography:

George Lakey is a former Professor for Issues in Social Change at Swarthmore College, USA, where he created and managed the Global Nonviolent Action Database research project.

Lakey has held teaching posts at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania and was a visiting lecturer at Woodbrooke College in Birmingham, UK. He has led over 1500 social change workshops on five continents, and founded and for fifteen years directed Training for Change. In 2010 he was named “Peace Educator of the Year” and published his authoritative text on adult education “Facilitating Group Learning” (Jossey-Bass). Each of his nine books has been about change and how to get it .