Political culture and television fiction: the amazing Mrs Pritchard

"Recently, the study of politics has expanded its scope by recognizing the constitutive power of `political culture' at the same time as cultural studies has become more interested in formal political processes and their relationship to popular culture. This article is a case study of political culture in the United Kingdom, focusing on one example of fictional expression, a television drama series broadcast in 2006: The Amazing Mrs Pritchard . The premise of the article is that the imaginative work of political fiction provides an opportunity to explore the cultural mediation of uncertainties and tensions in contemporary politics and political values. The framing of the series involves a generic mixture of realism and fantasy unusual in the British context and the key themes, which include political trust and the limits of political action, are discussed in relation both to their fictional articulation and their wider reference." [author's abstract

Soundings: documentary film and the listening experience

The associative, connotative and sheer emotive power of sound has the capacity to move and shake us in a myriad of direct, subtle and often profound ways. The implications of this for its role as speech, location sound, and music in documentary film are far-reaching. The writers in this book draw on the lived experience of sound’s resounding capacity as primary motivation for exploring these implications, united by the overarching theme of how listening is connected with acts of making sense both on its own terms and in conjunction with viewing

Wellbeing in Addiction Recovery: Does It Differ across Addictions?

Limited research has been conducted on the experiences of individuals in long-term recovery from addiction, and addictions are usually studied in isolation. However, no theories of addiction differentiate between addictions or assume that individuals will experience only one addiction. This study aimed to compare affect between individuals with addictions to drugs and alcohol and to explore how QoL changes in long-term recovery from addiction. Individuals in recovery from addiction (n = 115; 52.2% male) were recruited via snowball sampling on social media signposted by an addiction rehabilitation charity. Participants completed questionnaires about QoL (WHOQOL-Bref) and positive and negative affect (PANAS-X). The main primary addictions were drugs (76.5%) and alcohol (21.7%), with 69.7% reporting multiple addictions including food, sex, internet, and gambling. Affect and coping strategies did not differ by addiction. QoL appeared to improve with time in recovery. The high percentage of multiple addictions and greater similarities than differences between individuals with drug and alcohol addictions suggest that addictions should not be studied in isolation when studying psychological health during long-term recovery

Pleasure and meaningful discourse: an overview of research issues

The concept of pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural phenomenon in studies of media audiences since the 1980s. In these studies different forms of pleasure have been identified as explaining audience activity and commitment. In the diverse studies pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural concept that needs to be contextualized carefully. Genre and genre variations, class, gender, (sub-)cultural identity and generation all seem to be instrumental in determining the kind and variety of pleasures experienced in the act of viewing. This body of research has undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of audience activities, but it is exactly the diversity of the concept that is puzzling and poses a challenge to its further use. If pleasure is maintained as a key concept in audience analysis that holds much explanatory power, it needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The article maps the ways in which the concept of pleasure has been used by cultural theorists, who have paved the way for its application in reception analysis, and it goes on to explore the ways in which the concept has been used in empirical studies. Central to our discussion is the division between the ‘public knowledge’ and the ‘popular culture’ projects in reception analysis which, we argue, have major implications for the way in which pleasure has come to be understood as divorced from politics, power and ideology. Finally, we suggest ways of bridging the gap between these two projects in an effort to link pleasure to the concepts of hegemony and ideology

Television news and public knowledge : understanding the economy

This article reports on a study into news discourse and news reception. News about the economy has a distinctive character, owing to its regularity, its statistical emphasis and the "relational" complexity of the economy as a national system subject to political management and dispute. Having looked at some of the ways in which information and judgement of economic shifts are turned into the images and speech of news narrative and exposition, the article raises questions about the interpretation of economic news by viewers. The issues of comprehension and of evaluative predisposition are examined, with citation from recent fieldwork. News about the economy is clearly a requirement of public communication andan essential resource for citizenship. The article finishes with an assessment of the problems and challenges which journalism faces in this area.Une étude menée sur le discours de l'information et sa réception est à la base de cet article. Les actualités économiques se distinguent par leur régularité, par l'importance des statistiques et par la grande complexité des liens tissés entre l'économique et le politique. Après avoir étudié quelques-unes des façons dont l'information et l'analyse des tendances économiques se traduisent en images et en discours narratif, cet article s'interroge sur l'interprétation de l'information économique par les téléspectateurs. En se référant à de nombreux travaux récents, l'article examine les questions de la compréhension et de la prédisposition à l'évaluation. La transmission de l'information sur l'économie est une composante essentielle de la communication politique et constitue une ressource indispensable pour la citoyenneté. L'article se termine par une évaluation des problèmes et des défis que le journalisme rencontre dans ce domaine

Listen to Nice

In describing Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentary propaganda film, 'Listen to Britain' (1942), a film with an overtly poetic sensibility and dominantly musical soundtrack, John Corner asserts that ‘through listening to Britain, we are enabled to properly look at it'. This idea of sound leading our attention to the images has underpinned much of the collaborative work between composer and sound designer, Geoffrey Cox, and documentary filmmaker, Keith Marley. It is in this context that the article will analyse an extract of A Film About Nice (Marley and Cox 2010), a contemporary re-imagining of Jean Vigo’s silent documentary, 'A propos de Nice' (1930). Reference will be made throughout to the historical context, and the filmic and theoretical influences that have informed the way music and creative sound design have been used to place emphasis on hearing a place, as much as seeing it

Reflections on equality, diversity and gender at the end of a media studies headship

This article reflects, from a feminist perspective, on a five-year period as Head of a School of Media. It considers the position of media studies within the new academic capitalism, and the re-masculinisation of the university that this has produced. It considers strategies employed by the field to stake its own claim to that masculinisation, in particular the embrace of ‘the digital’. Finally it describes the challenges this posed for the author, and tactics employed in dealing with them

Developing a flexible automated continuous downstream processing system for research to clinical supply

Continuous manufacturing has gained a lot of attention over the last 10-15 years for numerous reasons such as the potential for higher efficiencies, reduced cost of goods, and improved product quality. However, the adoption of these technologies has been slow due to concerns over operating these processes in a GMP manufacturing environment. Some of these concerns relate to the operation of multiple continuous unit operations in an integrated process sequence. This presentation will highlight these concerns and show how these issues were addressed by developing an overarching automated and modular platform which can be easily reconfigured for processing most products. The developed automation platform is the result of a project funded by Innovate UK that brings together a number of biopharmaceutical companies including Allergan, AstraZeneca, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies and GSK to identify and address these issues. One objective of the project is to develop a flexible automated biologics downstream process consisting of multiple unit operations that can be rapidly reconfigured for manufacturing different products. To that end the process has been design with modularity in mind with each module having common inputs and outputs. The automation software has also been developed in a way that most typical downstream processes can be implemented in the system with little to no software updates. The ability to rapidly reconfigure the process has been demonstrated by using the system to produce three products with different process sequences. Another issue that inhibits the adoption of continuous technologies is the concern over simultaneously operating multiple unit operations. This presentation will detail how the automation software was developed to control both the key unit operations such as chromatography and filtration steps but also intermediate operations such as feed conditioning and viral inactivation steps. The automated system reduces the complexity of downstream processes, which can have in excess of eleven unit operations, to a single user-friendly interface. Implementing this control platform enables a single operator to control the entire process. This presentation will also detail how the automation strategy has been developed to enable a single operator to deal with start-up/shutdown, perturbations in the process and mid-process equipment turnover. It will highlight the challenges that have been faced when developing this system and how these have been overcome. The aim of this project was to improve efficiency by reducing processing time when compared to the current batch process and this was demonstrated by testing the system with three different products (a MAb and a MAb fusion protein). Furthermore, this presentation with show data from the production of three products that demonstrates comparability between the continuous process and the original batch processes. It will then detail how this was used to demonstrate the production of a large-scale clinical batch run