Hello from the other side of music video regulation

If we were rating music videos from the 80s, would Boy George’s be considered too subversive? The scantily clad women on Addicted to Love not for our children’s eyes? Or should common sense prevail? Rafal Zaborowski is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications. He is interested in music reception and social practices of listening, the co-evolution of media audiences and media institutions as well as in critical, qualitative methods of academic inquiry. He tweets via @myredtowel

‘Explode all our metaphors’ – on the potential of sound in media and audience studies. An interview with Martin Barker

In this interview Martin Barker discusses his recent studies concerning audience experiences of organised sound. Complicating a multi-sensory approach, he engages with a number of contested notions in the field, such as liveness or visualisation, and suggests that empirical work is necessary to better understand what they mean for the audiences – but methodologically, such empirical work is not without challenges. Reviewing a number of interdisciplinary publications, Barker argues that research of sound can help open up the field of audience studies, but to do that, we need a careful, historical analysis of sound audiences across time and place

Old topics, old approaches? ‘Reception’ in television studies and music studies

The question of reception is closely linked to the history and the roots of audience studies. But what is ‘reception’ and what exactly does it mean? As audience studies have developed from a contested novelty to a now established academic field, what do we do with a concept that defined our interests in the past and may now be too wide or even obsolete? This article deals with this issue by mapping how the concept of reception was conceptualized and researched in audience studies of the past ten years, with a focus on studies of music and studies of television. We find that in music, strong focus remains on music reception in the context of performances and events, and this lies in contrast to a small number of studies which instead focus on a framework of music in ordinary life and the audiences’ contextual localities. Concerning reception of television, much of the scholarship starts from the cultural studies tradition and looks at television viewing as a means to construct identities. Discussing these findings, we inquire whether the hybridization of media also implies a hybridization of research traditions and methodologies, and what consequences it has for the balance between textual, production and audience approaches

Gamers versus zombies? Visual mediation of the citizen/non-citizen encounter in Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’

This article identifies the visual representation of Europe’s “refugee crisis” in the media as a key dimension of the communicative architecture of the crisis and its aftermath. Effectively, it argues, the powerful, even iconic, imagery that the media produced and shared during the 2015 “crisis” affirmed ideological frames of incompatible difference, perpetually dividing European citizens and refugees. The article focuses on some of the fundamental elements of the 2015 crisis’s visual grammar to demonstrate how they have (re-)produced popular fears of strangeness and the need for containment and control of foreign bodies. This visual grammar, we argue, imitated and procreated recognizable representations of popular culture to exaggerate newcomers’ strangeness and incompatible difference from the national subject. On the one hand, many news media simulated zombies’ threatening strangeness in images of refugee massification; on the other, many news media images reaffirmed the decisive power of the national subject over refugees’ fate, not unlike the video game player who unilaterally controls a game and takes action when confronted by zombies. This grammar, we argue, symbolically predetermines encounters between citizens and refugees, by emphasizing their incompatible difference and newcomers’ strangeness

Refugee 'crisis'? Try 'crisis in the European press'

A new study finds some disturbing trends in the European press coverage of refugees and the purported consequences of their arrival. While it is now more common for “the refugee crisis” to be referred to in the media as last year’s affair, 2016 has been the deadliest year for refugees trying to reach Europe by sea. Only the recorded deaths in the Mediterranean present a chilling reality – and yet, this reality rarely makes headlines. Has journalism forgotten its mission? Has the public grown numb? When does crisis become a crisis? Our cross-European study of the press in 2015 sets the stage to engage with these questions and reveals a political and ethical predicament that touches upon the core values of Europe

Voice and community in the 2015 refugee crisis: a content analysis of news coverage in eight European countries

Drawing on a Content Analysis of 1200 news articles on the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ across eight European countries, we address the question of whether and how refugees ‘speak' in the news. To this end, we categorized the language of these articles in terms of how they narrated the subjects, status and contexts of voice. Our analysis establishes three different linguistic practices through which the voice of refugees is managed in the news – what we call practices of ‘bordering’: bordering by silencing, by collectivization and by de-contextualization. In light of these findings, we reach two conclusions. First, the distribution of voice in European news follows a strict hierarchy – one that relies on specifically journalistic strategies of selection and ordering yet reflects and reproduces broader hierarchies of the European political spheres. Second, this hierarchy of voice leads to a triple misrecognition of refugees as political, social and historical actors, thereby keeping them firmly outside the remit of ‘our’ communities of belonging

Audible audiences: engaging with music in Japan

In this thesis I aim to uncover the nature, quality and implications of audience engagement with popular music in everyday life. Specifically, I look at two post-war generations in modern Japan and analyse their listening practices and interpretations of music encounters. To investigate this, a mixed-method approach is used based on focus group and individual interviews, questionnaires, participant observation and expert interviews with industry representatives – 100 study participants overall. Emerging patterns and themes are identified through qualitative thematic analysis. In two case studies – of idol groups and vocaloid music - I focus on how audiences, especially fans, and producers interact, with a close bond emerging over a process of cultural co-evolution of production and reception. Then, I position this map of engagements within the experiences of two Japanese cohorts, “the lost” and “the relaxed”. I argue that their generational experiences and localities guide the frames through which they interpret music. I argue that listening to music is a complex social practice whose significance has been undervalued in audience research. Audiences make music choices and engage with musical texts according to specific modes and routines which should be analysed together. Following the legacy of literary and television audience studies, I propose an account of music listening in terms of a spectrum of audience engagements linked to texts, contexts, performances and authorship. The concepts of proximity (cultural proximity and the proximity between performers and audiences) inform the analysis of the circuit of culture, offering new insight into modes of engagement and production processes. Japan, home of the Walkman and karaoke, emerges from the analysis as not only the land of technological innovations in music, but also as a culture with wider implications for media and audience research

Figures of crisis: the delineation of (un)deserving refugees in the German media

This article examines how borders are discursively reproduced in representations of the ‘refugee crisis’ in the German media. Based on an extensive content and discourse analysis of German press representations in 2015 and 2016, we argue that the discourse of crisis obscures the reasons for migration and instead shifts the focus to the advantages and disadvantages that refugees are assumed to bring to their host country. More specifically, we contend that press discourses construct a figure of the (un)deserving refugee around three key themes: economic productivity; state security; and gender relations. In doing so, we illustrate how the framing of some lives as more or less deserving of protection than others directly mirrors and extends the humanitarian securitization of borders into public discourse

An analysis and evaluation of the WeFold collaborative for protein structure prediction and its pipelines in CASP11 and CASP12

Every two years groups worldwide participate in the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiment to blindly test the strengths and weaknesses of their computational methods. CASP has significantly advanced the field but many hurdles still remain, which may require new ideas and collaborations. In 2012 a web-based effort called WeFold, was initiated to promote collaboration within the CASP community and attract researchers from other fields to contribute new ideas to CASP. Members of the WeFold coopetition (cooperation and competition) participated in CASP as individual teams, but also shared components of their methods to create hybrid pipelines and actively contributed to this effort. We assert that the scale and diversity of integrative prediction pipelines could not have been achieved by any individual lab or even by any collaboration among a few partners. The models contributed by the participating groups and generated by the pipelines are publicly available at the WeFold website providing a wealth of data that remains to be tapped. Here, we analyze the results of the 2014 and 2016 pipelines showing improvements according to the CASP assessment as well as areas that require further adjustments and research