Update on 2014

In between all the rushing around and trying to carve out space to think and write and do stuff this blog has been rather neglected. Anyway, here is a quick update on various projects I'm attempting to keep in motion at the same time.

1. Remaking Society has ended but there is still some more 'output' that has yet to come to the surface from the project. Here's a short film that Hugh Kelly and I cut together which reflects on his 30 years of working in 'communities on the edge' in North Tyneside. We're going to write a longer reflective piece that comes out of this, hopefully to be published in one of the publications on 'Media at the Margins' that is coming out of the MECCSA conference earlier this year. In the meantime you can read the working paper that we produced for an AHRC Connected Communities symposium on social justice and co-produced research in November 2013 over at academia.edu.



The Odd Numbers project with Lee Ivett (Baxendale) and Nicola Atkinson (NADFLY) in Milton continues - we took the participatory pavilion to Room 13 in Caol, Fort William for a joint seminar/workshop with the UWS MEd Artist Teacher programme in February and we are planning a further pavilion to be developed for events later this year. There will be a book - and a ceremonial burial of the figures - later this year.  There are also some other chapters in other publications, co-authored with Kerrie Schaefer, Tom Wakeford and Neill Patton, that should see the light at the end of the year.

2. Following on from the Cultural Hijack extravaganza last year, I'm contributing to a project which UWS doctoral researcher Ben Parry is leading - The Experimental City - which seeks to build on the idea of the 'user generated city' (a term originated by URBZ in Dharavi, Mumbai) and how this is generated through live experiments in urban design, cultural interventions, and symbolic forms of occupation. There will be a book, a series of events and possibly even a film...

3. With Angie Bual of Trigger and the excellent theatre makers Davey Anderson and Gary McNair, together with Ben Colburn, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, we've just launched Flip Side - a project which seeks to explore the philosophical ideas sitting underneath the independence referendum debate. More on the project here:

4. I'm just back from a few days at Columbia College in Chicago and an excellent songwriting residency hosted by Gary Yerkins, who runs the programme in Contemporary, Urban and Popular Music there. There will be an album made of some of the wonderful music that has come out of the songwriting workshops which were initiated by my colleague Davie Scott who runs the MA in Songwriting and Performance at UWS. It's great to see some of the UK-US conversations that I began more than a decade ago lead to direct transatlantic collaborations between students. Surely more to follow.

5. I'm involved in a small way in another Connected Communities "legacy" project led by Kate Pahl and Steve Pool at the University of Sheffield, examining the roles that artists have played across the programme - in some ways this builds on the work that I did as part of the TAPP (Teacher Artist Partnership Programme) project - but translates these questions a little more broadly into a wider debate about artists' pedagogies, practice-led research and the role of artistic-academic dialogues - and the kinds of spaces in which these might happen -  in generating productive frictions that might open up enquiry.

6. I went to the AHRC research development workshop on exclusion, disconnection and division in March 2014 and came out with an interesting consortium of people developing a large project with the provisional title: Challenging Elites: Land, Rights, Resistance.  More on that when we know whether our proposal for a development grant has been successful...

7. Another ongoing research theme is about pedagogies for a networked and connected age - something akin to the work that is going on, in a more thorougly developed fashion, in the big MacArthur project on digital learning. Here's a presentation I did the other week for a group of staff from UWS and other Scottish universities. One of these days I will write all this up properly into some sort of publication/provocation:

"Social Media" and teaching and learning: some issues from Graham Jeffery

Creative Media Practice at UWS

In my day-job at the University of the West of Scotland, we've just launched our new MA Creative Media Practice, starting this September. It's is new and innovative programme focusing on the development of knowledge, understanding and creative and technical skills in the fast-moving areas of screen and broadcast, digital content creation and the wider creative industries, including audio, performance and digital arts.

Although based primarily at our Ayr Campus – which has some of Scottish higher education’s finest media, broadcasting, and recording facilities – parts of the programme may also be delivered at Glasgow’s Pacific Quay, and it's also likely that we'll be doing some projects and workshops at Glasgow's CCA, where UWS has just become a Cultural Tenant. Some of the intensive workshops, such as screenwriting and creative documentary, may also be offered as residential 2-3 day or one week events.

Aimed at graduates from a wide range of disciplines, and industry professionals seeking to enhance or diversify their skills, the programme has been designed with industry input, including consultation with Scottish Screen and Skillset. We think that the programme will appeal to experienced professionals looking to consolidate their work or even thinking about a change of direction. We're hoping to build a dynamic learning community and encourage lots of collaboration across the programme.

And we're very pleased to say that under a new initiative from the Scottish Funding Council, just announced, a number of funded places are available for part-time postgraduate diploma study of this programme (which covers the first half of the course).

There's more information here and you can contact the programme leader, Tony Grace, directly at Tony.Grace@uws.ac.uk.

Repetition Machine

It's interesting how this election has turned into a huge swarming experiment in social media. As I watch the coverage unfold, partly to keep myself amused in the lulls, I"m going to aggregate the various sources and tools I'm using into a new blog called Repetition Machine.

This is partly because in the last three hours I've found myself watching five different US news networks, listening to 6 different radio stations, browsing 3 or 4 different newspaper websites, using del.icio.us, digg, facebook etc etc. Such is the hunger for information. Or maybe I'm just informationally dysfunctional or deranged. Maybe it's just a substitute for 'being there' whatever that means. Maybe it's because there's only me and the family here in this lonely old house in Scotland to share talking about the election with. Where is 'There' anyway? But this has been a hypermedia election and really is the greatest show on earth right now.

A kind of virtual newsroom. Earlier this week I posted a video clip of Gil Scott Heron's "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" to my facebook page. But thinking about it I"m not so sure. This is no revolution in the Marxist sense but it is a revolution in some ways, in how politics is conducted. It's just a shame that so much of what is said is virtually content free, and still panders to the usual suspect platitudes. What is "Change We Need" anyway? But Obama's campaign has touched on a powerful emotional need for a sense of connectedness and community that has been woefully absent through the Bush years. Anyway, for more rambling like this, head over to the Repetition Machine.

on channels...Fame 2.0?

Staring at the computer screen with my eyes sagging and my neck aching, mid-afternoon, with the sun shining brightly outside, made me reflect on how many personal channels of communication we have to manage and maintain...and working simultaneously on multiple projects and with multiple teams of people just intensifies this sense of being informationally and emotionally challenged....

for example, in the general praxis world, just for one individual (graham), the list includes:

all the daily face to face interactions, meetings and conversations..

which are facilitated by and supplemented by

3 email accounts
1 land line
1 mobile phone
text messages
1 skype account
1 phone at work
this blog
social bookmarks
Myspace
Facebook
Websites in which work I am doing features...
Post at home
Post at work
Publications
occasional work on film,TV, the radio or in recorded media

Plus all the travel and mobility, a weekly 400 mile commute, tickets and keeping track of timetables...

As a freelancer, I don't have the luxury of any administrative support for the core business of managing my work, rather, as well as doing the work I have to do all the admin myself...

But is the 'new work paradigm' that we are all now disembodied, nomadic, multiskilled multitaskers? Perhaps it's the case that the higher up the economic ladder one is, the less one has to be like that, as you get more admin support and can, if you choose, 'outsource' more of the mundane tasks involved in everyday life...and for those largely excluded from the networked world, all of this communicative decadence is a distraction from the business of economic survival... for those of us in the 'lumpen intelligentsia' it's a delicate tightrope between a 'play ethic' and a tyranny of information overload in which sorting the wheat from the chaff, the core focus from the distractions, is a daily struggle. As Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised, and all this social media helps people construct identities in which they can easily become "a legend in their own minds..." Our identities (or at least the bits that we choose to share) are increasingly on 24-hour public display, networked globally through electronlc media...

is it any wonder that it all gets a bit overwhelming and stressful sometimes? I remember an edition of Newsnight when Jeremy Paxman referred in an offhand way to blogs as a form of obsessive compulsive disorder and perhaps he got it right...Certainly there's a need to prioritise which channels of communication to use for which purpose, and to have days when everything is just left switched off...perhaps we need a national Switch It Off day? I quite like the idea that social media enables us to become our own broadcasters and publicists, etc, but is anyone actually paying any attention? We still need high quality face to face communication. The networked and collaborative social and digital environments that we inhabit are very double-edged and may be as close to panopticons of spectacle and surveillance as they are liberating.

darkmatter

This is a smart new online journal/blog set up by my UEL colleague Ash Sharma - an independent post-colonial writing-machine - a mix of intelligent cultural commentary and links to useful sources and snippets of discourse which challenge a situation where "the blinding whiteness of network culture continues to make most of the planet's population invisible."