Regional imaginaries of governance agencies: practising the region of South West Britain

publication-status: AcceptedHarvey D C, Hawkins H, Thomas N J, 2011. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A 43(2) 470 – 486 DOI: 10.1068/a43380Copyright © 2011 PionChanges in government and governmentality in the UK have witnessed what has been termed a ‘regional renaissance’ over the last decade. This has led to an increase in the number of offices, institutions and agencies operating with a regional remit that is based upon a notion of fixed territorial containers. One sector that has increasingly been brought into the orbit of the new regional policy framework is that of the creative industries, and research is required in order to understand how creative industry governance agencies imagine and interpret the regional spaces that they administer. Notwithstanding the supposedly agreed upon and bounded nature of the territories over which they have competence, we find that personnel working within these regional bodies negotiate and imagine regional space in a number of ways. Drawing on empirical work with three creative governance agencies in the South West of Britain, we consider a range of dynamic and sometimes contradictory understandings of regional space as practised through their policy development and implementation. The paper traces how the practice of creative industry governance challenges the governmentally determined region and, by implication, any territorial unit as a naturally given container that is internally coherent and a discrete space available for governance. In doing so, the paper has broader lessons for effective policy delivery more generally

'Moments and opportunities': interstitials and the promotional imagination of BBC iPlayer

This article examines the promotion of the BBC’s online streaming and download service, iPlayer, as it has been presented to audiences through broadcast television. Analysing transitions in the BBC’s representation of iPlayer, it considers the promotional imagination of the service during the 2010s, a period when the Corporation was striving to communicate its digital identity and broaden iPlayer within mainstream use. Through industrial–textual analysis, the essay considers the paratextual function of iPlayer interstitials, and the relation of on-air promos to the Corporation’s internal strategy for the service in moving ‘beyond PC, beyond catch-up, beyond the early-adopter’

Media justice: Madeleine McCann, intermediatization and "trial by media" in the British press

Three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on 3 May 2007 from a holiday apartment in Portugal. Over five years and multiple investigations that failed to solve this abducted child case, Madeleine and her parents were subject to a process of relentless ‘intermediatization’. Across 24–7 news coverage, websites, documentaries, films, YouTube videos, books, magazines, music and artworks, Madeleine was a mediagenic image of innocence and a lucrative story. In contrast to Madeleine’s media sacralization, the representation of her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, fluctuated between periods of vociferous support and prolonged and libellous ‘trial by media’. This article analyses how the global intermediatization of the ‘Maddie Mystery’ fed into and fuelled the ‘trial by media’ of Kate and Gerry McCann in the UK press. Our theorization of ‘trial by media’ is developed and refined through considering its legal limitations in an era of ‘attack journalism’ and unprecedented official UK inquiries into press misconduct and criminality

Integrating Western and non-Western cultural expressions to further cultural and creative tourism: a case study

The term cultural industries was coined more than half a century ago, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the broader concept of creative industries, covering a wide range of cultural, design and digital activity, captured the imagination of public policymakers at national and city levels. Paralleling these developments has been the recognition of the phenomenon of cultural tourism and, more recently, the emergence of the idea of creative tourism, that is, tourism programmes designed to engage tourists actively in cultural activity. This paper presents a case study of a creative tourism event which took place in 2012 in the City of Manchester in the UK. The festival, which celebrated West African culture, utilised existing cultural institutions of the city and drew on the talents of local and visiting members of West African community to engage not only tourists but also indigenous and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) residents of Manchester in a variety of cultural activities. It thus used the focus of creative tourism to seek to foster community and cultural development as well as tourism

The Contribution of the Creative Economy to the Resilience of Rural Communities: Exploring Cultural and Digital Capital

© 2016 European Society for Rural Sociology. This article develops understanding of cultural and digital capital in order to evaluate the contribution of creative practitioners to rural community resilience. Online practices today impact on creative work in rural locales in a number of ways. However, exactly how they extend 'reach' and contribute to rural creativity deserves greater attention. We examine how broadband Internet access and online practices impact on rural creative work and, in turn, how this enables creatives to participate at different levels in their rural communities, thus contributing to research into both rural community resilience and rural creative economies by providing in-depth qualitative analysis. Through interviews undertaken in rural Scotland, the article outlines the implications of poor rural Internet connectivity for creative economies and explores the impact of this on the role of creatives in their rural communities and their 'community-focused' creative activities. Our findings suggest creative practitioners are using digital technologies and adaptive approaches to overcome barriers to connectivity and to remain in rural locations. Creatives are invested in their communities and their rurality on a number of levels, contributing to community resilience through building cultural capital in diverse ways, and to 'ripple effects' from online activities

Techniques of disinformation: constructing and communicating "soft facts" after terrorism

Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of “techniques of disinformation” used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also advances scholarship on the workings of disinforming communications, by focusing on a domain other than political elections, which has been the empirical focus for most studies of disinformation to date. Theoretically, the analysis is framed by drawing an analogy with Gresham Sykes and David Matza's (1957) account of the role of “techniques of neutralization” originally published in the American Sociological Review. The connection being that where they studied deviant behaviour, a similar analytic lens can usefully be applied to disinformation cast as “deviant” information