Following Andrew Chadwick's presentation on April 19, Ben O'Loughlin will present at the UK Political Studies Association Annual Conference at London's Novotel West on Tuesday April 20 at 3pm. His paper, 'Young People and the postponement of politics: Media, Insecurity and Multiculturalism in the UK', will examine the obstacles to mobilisation experienced by young people in the UK who felt political grievances towards the War on Terror around the 2004-07 period. The paper is co-authored with Marie Gillespie of the Open University and features on a panel Youth, Citizenship and Politics.
2011-04-19: Andrew Chadwick Presenting at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, London
Andrew Chadwick will be presenting a paper, "The Political Information Cycle in a Hybrid News System: the British Prime Minister and the 'Bullygate' Affair," at the UK Political Studies Association Annual Conference at London's Novotel West on Tuesday April 19.
Click here for the panel details.
The research paper on which this presentation will be based may be downloaded here.
2010-12-17: Postgraduate Conference: Questioning Transnationalism: Culture, Politics, and Media
QUESTIONING TRANSNATIONALISM: CULTURE, POLITICS & MEDIA
Date: 17 December 2010
Venue: Arts Building, Royal Holloway College, University of London
Sponsors: The Department of Media Arts and the Department of Politics and International Relations
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Thomas Diez (Political Science, University of Tübingen), Prof. David Chandler (Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster), Prof. Randall Halle (Department of German, University of Pittsburgh).
This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference focuses on transnationalism and securitisation, issues of increasing relevance in both Politics and International Relations, and Media and Film Studies. In both disciplines, there is currently a prevailing tendency to conceive of borders as ever increasingly permeable elements in a globalising world. New communication technologies have certainly reinforced the image that the world becomes a single place. However, a ‘borderless world’ proves to be illusionary as witnessed in the global rise of securitization practices after the September 11 terrorist attacks. ‘Transnationalism' thereby becomes a useful lens through which issues such as securitisation, borders, legitimacy, citizenship, memory and solidarity can be re-examined from a fresh theoretical perspective.
Within this framework, the major aims of this international conference are threefold: to question the extent and limitations of transnationalism; to analyse the cultural and political functions of transnational actors and the impact of new communication technologies such as the internet in the contemporary world; and finally to encourage interdisciplinary approaches and critical perspectives in the studies of transnationalism.
All are welcome! For further details, including the final programme and abstracts, please see: http://royalhollowayconference.com
2010-12-04: Conflicts of Memory: Mediating and Commemorating the London Bombings
Our colleagues at Nottingham University are holding an AHRC end of project symposium: ‘Conflicts of Memory: Mediating and Commemorating the London Bombings’ on the 4th and 5th of December (see project overview below). A few places are still available on both days. Refreshments and light lunch will be provided, so please let them know if you plan to attend for catering purposes (andrew.hoskins@nottingham.ac.uk). Please see the programme here, including a paper by the NPCU's Ben O'Loughlin.
Project Summary:
People routinely remember and use the past by interwining personal narratives with public events. People remember where they were when dramatic events occurred. These may be highly mediated memories, in film, on television, and in print, but they are still part of our very real personal and collective memories. Personal biography intersects with history in just this implicit way, locating the unfolding details of everyday life in terms of the events of the larger society - history in the making. This project traces the linkages between the media and our everyday remembering of past events through comparing the instant and archival capacities of television with people’s own retellings of events.
Very recently, there has been a massive increase in the availability and use of mobile phones equipped with cameras and videos in the UK which has led to images and film captured by bystanders being used to help create and shape breaking news stories. Our research investigates the impact of these personal media and individual accounts on television news coverage of traumatic events (the July 2005 London bombings) and also on how these events are later commemorated on television, and how they ultimately come to be remembered by the public.
2011-04-20 Cyber Security and Electronic Terrorism, Olympia, London
Ben O'Loughlin has been invited to speak as part of the Cyber Security and Electronic Terrorism stream at Counter Terror Expo 2011.
The programme is here.
Ben's stream will take place on Wednesday 20th April 2011 in the Grand Hall at Olympia.
2011-03-09: Dr Aeron Davis: The Cultural and Communicative Disembedding of UK Political Elites
March 9, 2011: Dr Aeron Davis (Goldsmiths, University of London).
Time: 5.30pm.
Location: Founders FW101. All welcome.
Title: The Cultural and Communicative Disembedding of UK Political Elites
About Aeron Davis
Aeron Davis has worked in departments of politics, sociology and media and communication. His research and teaching merges elements of each of these disciplines, and includes: public relations, politics and political communication; promotional culture, media sociology and news production; markets and economic sociology; elites and power. He has investigated communication at Westminster, the London Stock Exchange, amongst the major political parties and across the trade union movement. Along the way he has interviewed close to 300 high-profile individuals employed in journalism, public relations, politics, business, finance, NGOs and the civil service. He has published on each of these topics in journals and edited collections and is the author of Public Relations Democracy (MUP, 2002), The Mediation of Politics (Routledge, 2007), and Political Communication and Social Theory (Routledge, 2010). He is currently working on a book for Polity Press on the rise of promotional culture. He is the Director of the Goldsmiths MA in Political Communication, an active member of the Centre for the Study of Global Media & Democracy and a participant in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.
2010-10-06 Charlotte Epstein, Two talks on IR, discourse and communication
Discourse, the subject and identity in International Relations
Dr. Charlotte Epstein, University of Sydney
FW101, Founder’s Building, Royal Holloway University of London, 1.30pm
Following the Strategic Narratives programme of research initiated since 2009 to explore how states project their values, interests and identities in the international system, this Wednesday Dr. Epstein will address a series of our concerns:
Abstract: ’The concept of identity has attracted increasing attention in International Relations (IR). Yet what does it mean to study the ‘selves’ of international actors?’ The two pieces explored in today’s reading group propose that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity in IR than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. In the second piece for instance, Dr. Epstein starts with a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically borrowed from psychology. Jacques Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’ offers instead a non-essentialist basis for theorizing about identity that has been largely overlooked. This insight allows us to steer clear of the field’s fallacy of composition, which has been perpetuated by the assumption that what applies to individuals applies to states as well. This is illustrated empirically with regards to the international politics of whaling.
Dr. Charlotte Epstein is a senior lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. Homepage:
Participants must have read the following two pieces and be ready to discuss them:
1. The introduction to Charlotte’s book, The Power of Words in International Relations : Epstein Ch1 sample chapter
2. Charlotte’s latest piece in European Journal of International Relations, entitled ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and identity in international relations’ : Who Speaks?
Please note that Dr. Epstein will also deliver a presentation to the staff-student research seminar at 5pm in FW101.
2010-09-26 NPCU@ Al-Jazeera, Doha
Ben O'Loughlin will speak at a two day workshop at the Al-Jazeera Center for Studies, Doha, on 26-27 September 2010. The workshop is on the theme Perspectives on Terrorism, Violence and Resistance. The event is in partnership with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Muslim Research Centre, Exeter University. Ben will touch on a number of points raised in the forthcoming book Media & Radicalisation.
2010-05-05 Film event: Watching the Daily Life
The Reflections of Turkey-EU Relations Beyond Politics: Watching the Daily Life
We would like to invite you to our workshop and the screening of the
film ’Coffee Futures’ by Dr. Zeynep Gursel from the University of
Michigan. The event is co-organized by the Department of Media Arts and
the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal
Holloway, University of London:
Title of the event: “The Reflections of Turkey-EU Relations Beyond
Politics: Watching the Daily Life”
Date: Wednesday 5 May 2010, 4-7pm
Venue: Windsor Building Auditorium, RHUL, Egham
The event is open to public and free.
There will be refreshments and a wine reception.
Details of the film are here.
For any queries please contact: Ayca Tunc (A.Tunc@rhul.ac.uk) or Didem
Buhari (M.D.Buhari@rhul.ac.uk)
Programme
16:00 Opening remarks by H.E. Mr. Yigit Alpogan, Ambassador of the
Republic of Turkey
16:10 First presentation on Turkish public opinion by Didem Buhari and
Baris Gulmez(Royal Holloway, Department of Politics and International
Relations)
16:30 Screening of the film ’Coffee Futures’ and Q&A by Zeynep Devrim
Gursel(http://www.coffeefuturesfilm.com/)
17:20 Coffee break
17:40 Prof. Chris Rumford’s talk (Royal Holloway, Department of
Politics and International Relations)
18:00 Second presentation on the reception of Turkish-German filmmakers
in the Turkish press by Ayca Tunc (Royal Holloway,Department of Media
Arts)
18:20 Q&A session
18:30 Conclusion remarks by Dr. Daniela Berghahn(Royal Holloway,
Department of Media Arts)
18:40 Wine reception
2010-08-31 NCPU@CRESC Oxford annual conference - Automated Mass Observation?
Lawrence Ampofo and Ben O'Loughlin will present a paper on social media monitoring at the CRESC Annual Conference on 31 August - 3 September 2010, University of Oxford. Previous CRESC conferences have been an excellent forum bringing together social theory and methodology and this year's theme, 'The Social Life of Methods' allows us to explore the intriguing possibility that our methods dictate our knowledge and action rather than being tools we use to shape social change.
Our paper, 'Real-Time Social Media Monitoring: Automated Mass Observation?', presents a new method of mining and extracting insight from social media feeds. It exemplifies the dilemma of how new forms of tracing and visualising social interactions may channel the questions we ask and the conclusions we seek to draw. Designed by experts in computational linguistics at Linguamatics and researchers at Royal Holloway's New Political Communication Unit, the methodology Real-Time Social Media Monitoring allows researchers to aggregate and analyse data from social media platforms as an event or crisis unfolds to inform timely decision making. The tools and techniques that constitute the methodology can be used for a broad range of purposes in politics and business, such as identifying shifting brand reputations, key opinion leaders, viral content, and emergent groupings, networks and the geolocation of citizens/users. The paper demonstrates this through a series of case studies examining public responses to H1N1 vaccine take-up, the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, Haiti's earthquake, and the 2010 UK General Election.
The presentation of this methodology and the case studies raise a number of methodological, conceptual and ethical questions. Methodologically, how do we visualise social networks as they evolve in real-time and how do our visualisations feed back into policy interventions? How can we maintain validity of conceptualisation, measurement and inference in social media analysis? And how do we discern intent? For instance, acts of expression-for-itself, persuasion, and deception all occur in our cases. Conceptually, what does our methodology imply for traditional distinctions of public/private, broadcast/dialogue and directed/emergent communications? Ethically, is social media monitoring simply a non-intrusive instant polling technique, or a form of Mass Observation for the 21st Century?