Accent and Identity: Where do the East Midlands fit in the North/South divide?

Natalie Braber reports back from the Borders and Identities Conference.

In the worst of the recent weather, I braved the snow and ice to travel to attend the Borders and Identities Conference (BIC2010) which took place 8-9 January at Newcastle University. This was the first BIC Conference, and has been started under the auspices of the Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border (AISEB) project. The main aim of this conference was to examine in more detail the current state of knowledge in this field of study and to relate linguistic studies to other fields of enquiry to further interdisciplinary with other disciplines. Although research on ‘borderlands’ is well-established in the social sciences, it is only within recent years that interest in has taken hold within the fields of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language.

I had been accepted to give a poster presentation on a project I’ve recently started work on which looks at the question ‘Where do the East Midlands fit in the North/South divide?’ Although this divide is a frequently talked about phenomenon, there is much disagreement about where this border can be placed – and Nottingham (and the East Midlands) fall right into this potential border area. From the sixteenth century onwards there have been references to the river Trent as being a cultural and linguistic divide between North and South. Linguistically, language in Nottingham and the East Midlands is a much neglected variety and much more needs to be learned about its particular features.

The work I have carried out so far (funded by SIS – Stimulating Innovation for Success at NTU) has collected a small sample of voices from Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to examine the variation found within the East Midlands, comparing these findings with previous research. It also considers future work which needs to be carried out within this field – re-examining the perception of the North-South divide and how the East Midlands fit into such a division, as viewed both by those from the East Midlands and from around the UK.

The conference took place in The Assembly Rooms which was a great location for a conference – it had plenty of space for delegates to mingle and discuss projects during coffee and lunch breaks. Fortunately, most of the delegates made it through the bad weather and the conference was so successful that discussions about the next location are already taking place.

(photo credit: John the Scone; permissions)

Recent Calls for Papers

Below is a round-up of some recent notices about upcoming conferences that might interest people working in cultural studies.

First up is the recent call for papers for the MeCCSA postgraduate conference to be held at the University of Glasgow, 30 June - 1 July 2010. The organizers invite papers from postgraduate students working on any topic relevant to media, communication and cultural studies with a deadline for abstracts of 15 March 2010. The  Screen conference  also takes place at its usual home of the University of Glasgow, 2-4 July 2010. Although a strand of the conference will focus on performance, the conference welcomes papers from any area of Screen studies. The deadline for abstracts is 8 January 2010.

Finally, the next Console-ing Passions conference  will be held at the University of Oregon, 22-24 April 2010. This major international conference focuses on feminist research in television, aural and new media. The deadline for abstracts is 2 November 2010.

(Totally gratuitous use of picture of Vitra conference centre credits: alan.2008. Permissions)

Conference Report: Language and (New) Media

Dean Hardman reports back from The Language and New (Media) Conference that took place at the University of Washington in Seattle between the 3rd and 5th of September.

This was the third conference in a series that has examined the role of the media in relation to the construction or representation of language, with the two previous incarnations taking place in Leeds in 2005 and 2007. While those conferences were built around themes of ideology in relation to how the media represented, constructed and produced language, this conference purported to take a step further and invited delegates to look more closely at the roles that new technologies and ideologies associated with new media play in the construction and representation of language.

As it turned out, the papers presented were an eclectic mix of studies and theories that discussed not only the discourses of blogs, wikis, texting, instant messaging, internet art, video games, virtual worlds, websites, emails, podcasting, hypertext fiction and graphical user interfaces, but also how these discourses affect the world in which we live and how new technologies have changed the ways in which we communicate and live our lives.

In general terms, the conference showed that the analysis of media discourse has well and truly embraced the electronic age, with a number of papers examining the role that social networking websites play in people’s lives and, by extension, how the language of these new genres has developed alongside the development of new technologies. Indeed, this was the thrust of one of the plenary speakers’ presentations, Jannis Androutsopoulos of Kings College London, who discussed computer mediated communication (CMC) and how processes of multimodality, intertextuality and heteroglossia can be used to describe and explain the generic features of web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

Another interesting plenary talk was given by Naomi Baron (American University) who focused upon how mobile phone use has reshaped social encounters. She presented data from a study involving university students from the USA, Japan, Italy, Sweden and Korea, which described how use of mobile phones has resulted in people feeling as though they have lost control of social encounters.

Clearly it is impossible in a blog entry such as this to discuss all of the 60 papers presented, but one other session that was particularly worthwhile was the special panel on the BBC voices project. Bethan Davies (University of Leeds) talked about how the BBC’s voices season had sought to utilise the internet to “stimulate a national conversation about language use in the UK”. She discussed how users had submitted their thoughts about their own languages, accents and dialects, and described some of the limitations of the project, such as the selection of specific languages and the availability of discussion forums. The paper offered evidence of a new way of examining accents and dialects as well as attitudes towards them through CMC.

(photo credit: kendrya, permissions)

Conference Round-up

Many of the big cultural studies conferences have recently announced calls for papers for 2010. Here is our round-up of them.

The huge international conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies is heading to Hong Kong in July 2010. Invited speakers include Andrew Ross and Tony Bennett. The deadline for proposals is December 2009.

The next Cultural Studies Association (US) conference is in Berkeley in March 2010 with the deadline for proposals on 15 September 2009.

Also in California and (rather bizarrely) at the same time, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2010 conference is in Los Angeles (indeed, at the Bonaventure Hotel for that 'authentic' postmodern experience). With a conference theme of 'Celebrating 50 Years: Archiving/Screening/Mobilizing the Pasts and Futures of SCMS', the deadline for proposals is 1 September 2009.

Closer to home, the MeCCSA's 2010 conference is in London with a focus on 'Media Communication, Policy and Practice'. Among numerous invited speakers are (the seemingly much in demand) Tony Bennett, Georgina Born, Paul du Gay and Sylvia Harvey. With the conference scheduled for January 2010, the deadline for proposals is 18th September 2009.
(Photo credit: DrareG. Permissions)

Of Screen, Glasgow and Gortex

Martin O'Shaughnessy reports back from the (very rainy) annual Screen Conference in Glasgow.


I went up to Glasgow last week for the Screen Studies conference. which takes its name from the seminal journal Screen. Screen was at its height of fame / notoriety back in the 1970s when, drawing on a powerful, heady and often tyrannical mix of Althusserian Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, it was right at the cutting edge of screen theorising. It is now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and has just brought out a special number that maps out where screen theorising is today. Working in the same vein, this year’s conference sought to map where screen theorising has come from and where it needs to go. Conference plenaries delivered by conference luminaries tended to emphasise the ‘coming from’ angle and looked back to the intense, heady days of the seventies with a mixture of relief that it was over and a sense of nostalgia for its lost passion, excitement and political radicalism. Conference panels, of which there were many this year (meaning one missed much more than one heard) were more likely to look at the contemporary period. The panels helped the conference open up to screen theorising and not simply Screen Theory while taking it away from a narrowly UK-centred understanding of screen studies (I heard, for example, a very good panel on African screens).

A conference is a multi-bodied, multi-voiced beast so that what was said in it always defies easy summation. One insistent note that did emerge however was a sense that the object of screen studies had changed so profoundly over the years that we were no longer sure what we should be looking at or how. Screen had once existed in a world where cinema studies was only an emerging discipline and where television struggled to achieve recognition as a worthy object of study. Now the talk is more likely to be of the ‘death’ of cinema and the demise of television as a core national entertainment with a mass and sometimes family audience. Faced with the proliferation of screens big and small, the multiplicity of TV channels, the fragmentation of audiences, the dematerialisation of the digital image and the diversification of viewing practices, it is no longer clear what we should study or how. Can those of us who teach film and television even know any more what our students might be watching and what grounds we can meet them on? One way to respond to this frighteningly shifting terrain is clearly nostalgia: nostalgia for the old concentrated communion between film spectator and sacred cinematic texts; nostalgia for the days when the nation sat in front of Dennis Potter or Coronation Street; nostalgia for the solid materiality of the cinematic image and its indexical relationship to the real. But nostalgia doesn’t take you very far. The past is best used as a resource for comparison and critical distance rather than as a place of retreat.

Glasgow, when we arrived, was in the midst of a deluge, as the Scottish clouds perhaps shed tears for Andy Murray’s sad, semi-final defeat. It was then that my trusty blue Gortex, not as old as Screen, but more useful in a rainstorm, came to my rescue, keeping me dry from the knees up. I was nonetheless drenched from the knees down. Should I confess that my first act on arriving at the conference was to retreat to the bathroom to try to dry my trouser bottoms with the hand dryer? Thankfully no-one came in while I was doing this. Trying to explain to an eager conference goer why you are standing on one leg in the washroom is not the easiest thing to do. Explaining Screen theory, on balance, is probably easier (and much dryer).

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A Conference Report on American Independent Cinema

At the beginning of May (8 -10th) an international conference on American Independent Cinema organised by Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool) and Claire Molloy (Liverpool John Moores) took place at the Liverpool Screen School. American Independent Cinema was the first conference of its kind devoted to the subject and not surprisingly it turned out to be a highly focused, intellectually stimulating and hotly contested topic that provided many friendly disagreements on what might constitute the independence of the title. If anything the debate over definitions and discourses proves what a vibrant subject area this is and no doubt will be for years to come. The conference also served to house the launch of the book series American Indies that I co-edit with conference organiser Yannis Tzioumakis.

The conference was spread over three days with parallel panels punctuated by keynotes from a roster of scholars on American cinema including Janet Staiger (University of Texas – Austin), Peter Kramer (University of East Anglia), Warren Buckland (Oxford Brookes), and Geoff King (Brunel). Conference paper topics and keynotes were diverse in their topics and methodologies from poverty row Tarzans to mumblecore, archival research, data mining, and good old-fashioned textual analysis. Most participants topics gestured towards a number of tensions and topoi upon which the future study of American Independent Cinema might find direction. The major, yet overlapping, division was between on the one hand, a perspective that sees American independent cinema in terms of art and authorship, and the other hand, one that sees American Independent Cinema as inseparable from industrial and institutional machinations. Of course both positions have their own merit and synthesize quite well although the latter was where the mature scholarship was mostly demonstrated. What did surprise me most was the waning of identity politics since the cultural and ideological framing that once defined independent luminaries like John Sayles and Todd Haynes (neither it turns out were mentioned) seemed no longer on the agenda therefore, nothing on New Queer Cinema, only two papers on race, a few on women and feminism; but maybe that’s because the identity issue is fairly exhausted in relation to this topic. What the conference did suggest is that there are so many different accounts of what independence means, that its not just industrial, political, and aesthetic but also epistemological since the meaning of American Independent Cinema and what constitutes knowledge about it is always shifting. In many ways the conference also proves that the concept of American Independent Cinema is a bit like the way we think of genre – a triangulated field of meaning between text, audience and industry that (depending on your position) either aligns awkwardly or monolithically.