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Film, media, cultural studies clusters

Our research spans a variety of academic disciplines including:

  • journalism
  • film and television studies
  • arts management
  • digital culture.

We are strongly committed to working across or between these disciplinary boundaries and often engage in thematic research to bring various scholarly perspectives together in new combinations. Our research is both academic and practice-based: listed below are the research questions that particularly interest us.

We welcome applications from prospective graduate students proposing to work within these research areas. 

Cultural history/memory/archive

  • Silke Arnold-de Simine: 'How do memory and remembrance discourses influence national and international trends in museum cultures?'
  • Sophie Hope: 'How are narratives of art and politics constructed and challenged through collective story-telling?'
  • Janet McCabe: 'How does television act as a mediator of 'the past' as public history?'
  • Joel McKim: 'How do memorial and museum spaces contribute to political communication?'
  • Dorota Ostrowska: 'How are new forms of film history mediated through film festivals and other innovative kinds of cinema exhibition and distribution?'
  • Simone Wesner: 'How is cultural value reflected in memory?'

Curatorial Enquiry/Exhibition/Festivals

  • Silke Arnold-de Simine:'How do museums contribute to transforming living memory into institutionally constructed and sustained narratives and commemorative practices which enact and give substance to group identities and foster memory communities'?
  • Sophie Hope: 'How are curatorial and artistic failures, compromises and embarrassments communicated and understood?'
  • Dorota Ostrowska: 'How can world exhibitions, carnivals and fairs be seen as precursors of film festivals?'

Identity/experience/bodies

  • Andrew Asibong: 'How do certain kinds of film and moving image affect and transform our experience of ourselves as embodied, relational and emotional beings?"
  • Tim Markham: 'Is there something political about the way bodies experience media technologies?'
  • Janet McCabe: 'How does film and television politicise the representation of gendered identities?'
  • Dorota Ostrowska: 'How do new kinds of exhibition and spectatorial practices transform the contemporary experience of cinema?'
  • Simone Wesner: 'How is cultural identity articulated in an artist career?'

Media flows/cities/spaces

  • Janet McCabe: 'How does television translate across national borders and in diverse geographic regions?'
  • Joel McKim: 'How are digital technologies impacting the design of architecture and cities?'
  • Scott Rodgers: How have urban spaces been a longstanding focus for and milieu of professional and amateur journalism?
  • Justin Schlosberg: What are the causes and potential solutions to market failure in local news?'
  • Dorota Ostrowska: 'Does the festivalisation of urban spaces result in new kinds of hetorotopias?'

politics/media/social change

  • Silke Arnold-de Simine: 'How are social memories constructed, transmitted, transformed and remediated by different media technologies?'
  • Andrew Asibong: In what ways do our internal transformations, often mediated via moving images, relate to the changes we can potentially make in the external world?'
  • Sophie Hope: 'How, why and to what effect do socially engaged art commissions propose alternative forms of participatory democracy?'
  • Tim Markham: 'Why do we put so much faith in the power of new media platforms to bring about political change?'
  • Scott Rodgers: 'How do new media practices and technologies reshape specifically 'urban' politics or public cultures?'
  • Justin Schlosberg: 'How far do the professional news media still serve a hegemonic function?'

Post-Media/Convergence/Expanded Media

  • Tim Markham: 'How do we learn to improvise judgements about taste and trust in social media?'
  • Joel McKim: 'What are the implications of media becoming ambient and environmental?'
  • Scott Rodgers: 'How do emergent location-aware platforms and infrastructures provide for new senses of and claims to local place?'
  • Justin Schlosberg: 'Is the internet still "open"?'
  • Simone Wesner: 'How is creativity perceived in virtual multi-user environments?'