Sparrows can't sing : East End kith and kinship in the 1960s

Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by the late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in the East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career spanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl in the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage and the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, often selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences (Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre Workshop subsequently became better known for their appearances on film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material for the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television commercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre Workshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice which she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32). The hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer, in some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t Sing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in Britain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the urban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration, I shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular community’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and for its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques (recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic delivery in performance

Posthumanist Education

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Five Ws and an H: Digital Challenges in Newspaper Newsrooms and Boardrooms

It is no news to anyone involved with the media, from the newsroom to the boardroom to the classroom, that journalism is at a crossroads as an occupation, a business, a content form, and a public good. This is perhaps particularly true of journalism in the traditional news medium of record, the newspaper, where enormous uncertainty surrounds virtually every facet of the enterprise as it adjusts to being part of a digital network. This essay uses a framework familiar to journalists and journalism educators -- the traditional “five Ws and an H” of who, what, when, where, why, and how -- to address some of the significant issues facing corporate and newsroom managers, as well as journalists themselves

Is there an app for that? A case study of the potentials and limitations of the participatory turn and networked publics for classical music audience engagement

The participatory turn, fuelled by discourses and rhetoric regarding social media, and in the aftermath of the dot.com crash of the early 2000s, enrols to some extent an idea of being able to deploy networks to achieve institutional aims. The arts and cultural sector in the UK, in the face of funding cuts, has been keen to engage with such ideas in order to demonstrate value for money; by improving the efficiency of their operations, improving their respective audience experience and ultimately increasing audience size and engagement. Drawing on a case study compiled via a collaborative research project with a UK-based symphony orchestra (UKSO) we interrogate the potentials of social media engagement for audience development work through participatory media and networked publics. We argue that the literature related to mobile phones and applications (‘apps’) has focused primarily on marketing for engagement where institutional contexts are concerned. In contrast, our analysis elucidates the broader potentials and limitations of social-media-enabled apps for audience development and engagement beyond a marketing paradigm. In the case of UKSO, it appears that the technologically deterministic discourses often associated with institutional enrolment of participatory media and networked publics may not necessarily apply due to classical music culture. More generally, this work raises the contradictory nature of networked publics and argues for increased critical engagement with the concept

Breaking Open the Black Boxes: media archaeology, anarchaeology and media materiality

An essay on the emergent methodology of media archaeology, in relation to the material turn in approaches to digital media. In particular, this article advocates taking up Siegfried Zielinski's concept of 'anarchaeology', but in a different sense to the way it was originally proposed, in order to emphasise the political potentials of a media (an)archaeological methodological approach

Telepresence and the Role of the Senses

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses

"Meaning" as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping, and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning

The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication of information is studied in the information sciences and scientometrics, the communication of meaning has been central to Luhmann's attempts to make the theory of autopoiesis relevant for sociology. Analytical techniques such as semantic maps and the simulation of anticipatory systems enable us to operationalize the distinctions which Luhmann proposed as relevant to the elaboration of Husserl's "horizons of meaning" in empirical research: interactions among communications, the organization of meaning in instantiations, and the self-organization of interhuman communication in terms of symbolically generalized media such as truth, love, and power. Horizons of meaning, however, remain uncertain orders of expectations, and one should caution against reification from the meta-biological perspective of systems theory

The pursuit of happiness: the social and scientific origins of Hans Selye’s natural philosophy of life

© The Author(s) 2012. Open access article.In 1956, Hans Selye tentatively suggested that the scientific study of stress could ‘help us to formulate a precise program of conduct’ and ‘teach us the wisdom to live a rich and meaningful life’. Nearly two decades later, Selye expanded this limited vision of social order into a full-blown philosophy of life. In Stress without Distress, first published in 1974, he proposed an ethical code of conduct designed to mitigate personal and social problems. Basing his arguments on contemporary understandings of the biological processes involved in stress reactions, Selye referred to this code as ‘altruistic egotism’. This article explores the origins and evolution of Selye’s ‘natural philosophy of life’, analysing the links between his theories and adjacent intellectual developments in biology, psychosomatic and psychosocial medicine, cybernetics and socio-biology, and situating his work in the broader cultural framework of modern western societies.Wellcome Trus

Geographical imagination and technological connectivity in East Africa

The paper analyses and compares two transformative moments of technologically-mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896-1903) and the introduction of fibre-optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa in 2009. It uses discourse analysis to examine how technologically-mediated connectivity has been represented by political and economic actors during these transformative moments. In both cases, we explore the origins of the expectations of connectivity and the hope and fear associated with them. Building on Massey’s notion of power-geometry and Sheppard’s concept of positionality the paper focuses on power relationships in discussions of connectivity and asks how people understand the abilities of transformative technologies to modify positionalities and alter relational distance and proximity. Ultimately, by examining historical and contemporary expectations of connectivity in East Africa, this paper allows us to work towards creating more grounded and historicised understandings of the coming-together of technology and connectivity