I, Anna (2012) and the Femme Fatale: Neo-Noir and Representations of Female Old Age

Through textual analysis this paper explores neo-noir film I, Anna (Southcombe, 2012). This paper promotes the concept of the femme fatale in modern film noir as having much to offer women and ageing studies. Older women on screen have commonly been theorised within two opposing paradigms: ageing as decline, and ageing successfully. This paper argues that through a specific representation of the aged femme fatale body I, Anna offers a destabilisation of the common femme fatale stereotype. This contributes a more nuanced understanding of women and ageing on screen than the representations that are usually discussed in film and/or ageing studies. This paper also marks out this neo-noir British film as an interesting avenue from which to explore the representation of ageing women in film, as existing research has so far focussed on romantic comedy and bio-pic. This paper therefore seeks to add to the growing body of new work on female ageing and representations in the media

I, Anna (2012) and the Femme Fatale: Neo-Noir and Representations of Female Old Age

Through textual analysis this paper explores neo-noir film I, Anna (Southcombe, 2012). This paper promotes the concept of the femme fatale in modern film noir as having much to offer women and ageing studies. Older women on screen have commonly been theorised within two opposing paradigms: ageing as decline, and ageing successfully. This paper argues that through a specific representation of the aged femme fatale body I, Anna offers a destabilisation of the common femme fatale stereotype. This contributes a more nuanced understanding of women and ageing on screen than the representations that are usually discussed in film and/or ageing studies. This paper also marks out this neo-noir British film as an interesting avenue from which to explore the representation of ageing women in film, as existing research has so far focussed on romantic comedy and bio-pic. This paper therefore seeks to add to the growing body of new work on female ageing and representations in the media

The Dennis Potter Heritage Project: Auto/Ethnography as Process and Product

The Dennis Potter Heritage Project provides a unique opportunity for complex empirical research. It offers the researcher a chance to study the organisational and cultural processes involved in the evolution of a heritage project, created to celebrate a locally important and culturally significant media icon. It promotes the exploration of memory within the locally specific heritage environment of the Forest of Dean and the Dean Heritage Centre’s exhibition space, and it offers the opportunity to study emergent ideas of affect and emotion (Clough 2007; Thrift 2008). Research on the DPHP therefore necessitates a new, complex and innovative approach to methods and methodology. This paper explores autoethnography as both a process a methodology) which can be combined with other qualitative methods, and as a final product (as a mode of writing adopted in the finished research)

Media Heritage and Memory in the Museum: Managing Dennis Potter’s Legacy in the Forest of Dean

This research explores the ways in which Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is made inheritable to audiences through a rural Heritage Lottery Funded project. With the sale of the written Potter Archive to the Dean Heritage Centre, Gloucestershire, in 2010, this study explores in great detail the processes enacted to interpret the Potter Archive as cultural (television) heritage. Through a creative and innovative research design which utilises autoethnography, inventive qualitative methods and a level of quantitative analysis, this study examines the ways in which Potter is made intelligible to past television audiences, project members and collaborators, local people, and the casual tourist within the heritage environment. A unique and irreproducible study, this interdisciplinary research sits as a contribution to an emerging field that is located at the interface between Memory studies and Museum Studies and explores the way various forms of mediation are connected to these fields. Inherently at stake in this research is the valorisation of television as heritage, as Potter remains well within living memory. Through proximate and intimate connections to this multifaceted heritage project this work represents one of the first interventions to explore turning television into heritage at a local level drawing together the macro level of cultural policy with the micro level of enacting that policy. In asking how Dennis Potter’s legacy is managed in the Forest of Dean heritage environment, this thesis explores the ways Potter’s legacy is mediated, how television heritage is consumed and made meaningful (or struggles for meaning) in the museum space, how a writer’s legacy is interpreted by heritage professionals, volunteers, past television audiences and museum visitors, and how television as heritage is consumed online. This thesis makes visible the underlying mechanisms by which the Dennis Potter Archive is (or might yet become) articulated as television heritage, through examining the core managerial, interpretive and memorial processes involved in this high stakes, multi-partner project

Ageing in a network society: An Introduction

This special issue aims to explore the role of ICTs in encouraging the development of networked older adults. Specifically, the following papers give a noteworthy contribution to the challenges posed by an increasingly ageing and networked society. This special issue is edited by colleagues whose disciplines are not naturally symbiotic – one from Information and Communication studies and the other from Ageing studies. As such, this special issue posed an interesting set of challenges for the editors as they explored their shared understandings of what it means to grow old or be old in a network society. The editors would therefore like to thank the authors for their receptiveness to ageing studies theory and for challenging their own assumptions about what it means to be old. This special issue acts, in some ways, as a stepping stone or a bridge between more information technological based notions of what it is to grow older and cultural gerontological constructions of older age

Reproductive performance of resident and migrant males, females and pairs in a partially migratory bird

We thank everyone from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) who contributed to data collection, and Scottish Natural Heritage for access to the Isle of May National Nature Reserve. We thank the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club (SOC) for their support, and all volunteer observers, particularly Raymond Duncan, Moray Souter and Bob Swann. HG was funded by a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CASE studentship supported by CEH and SOC, FD, SW, MPH, MN and SB were funded by NERC and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, and JMR was part-funded by the Royal Society. Finally, we thank the Associate Editor and two reviewers for constructive comments on the manuscript. The data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.532j0 (Grist et al., 2017)Peer reviewedPublisher PD