Developments in digital technology and software afford compelling new possibilities for conducting audio-visual analysis and conveying audio-visual arguments about audio-visual objects of study, including television. Professor Catherine Grant and Dr Janet McCabe (both from Birkbeck, University of London) will lead a one-day workshop at Aarhus University’s Department of Media Studies and Journalism on these emerging videographic methodologies, specifically in the context of research and pedagogy on transnational television. During the workshop participants will learn how to conceive media criticism in the form of digital sound and moving images with a view to beginning to produce their own work in this idiom.
In the workshop, we will engage with some of key questions facing media scholarship in the digital age: how might audio-visual methods transform the analytical and rhetorical strategies used by media scholars, especially in the field of transnational television studies? How could the form help us develop new ways of thinking about, and practising research in transnational television? How might such creative digital scholarship both challenge and fit into the norms of contemporary academia, including television studies? In this workshop setting, we start with the challenges of researching the transnational in television, before considering the theoretical foundation for such forms of digital scholarship and will demonstrate some of the advantages of producing such experimental work. The goal will be to explore a range of approaches by using moving images and sounds as a critical and expressive method and to expand the analytical and expressive possibilities available to innovative television and media scholars.
Participants are not expected to have experience producing videos – the workshop is aimed at exploring the new format, the possibility of its use in research and stimulating new ideas. The event is aimed at PhD students, early career researchers, and established academics who are interested in learning more about this new scholarly form by taking a hands-on approach (using their own computer equipment). Participants will be directed to resources ahead of time to prepare for the workshop.
9.00-9.30: Introduction to the Workshop and Challenges for Studying the Transnational in Television
Studies. JM
9.30-11.00: Introducing Video Essays in Media Studies Research and Pedagogy: Lecture and Screening.
CG
11.00-11.30: Coffee Break
11.30-12.15: Presenting a Video Essay on Studying Transnational Television. CG & JM
12.15-13.15: Participants’ Project Ideas Pitch and Discussion accompanied by lunch. CG & JM
13.30-15.00: Hands on Workshop Session. CG & JM
Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she teaches and researches on-line audiovisual cultures, audiovisual essay practices and digital forms of analysis and criticism. Originally a scholar of Latin American culture, she has researched transnational and global cinema studies since the early 1990s and produced the volume Screening World Cinema (co-ed. with Annette Kuhn, Routledge, 2006). A prolific experimental video-essayist, she curates the Film Studies for Free blog and the Audiovisualcy group and is a founding co-editor of the award-winning publication [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.
Janet McCabe is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Birkbeck, University of London, where she teaches and researches television, film/television programming and archiving. Along with Prof. Grant, she is part of the Essay Film Festival programming team, with particular responsibility for the TV essay strand. She is Editor-in Chief of Critical Studies in Television and has written widely on feminism and contemporary television culture. She has co-edited several collections, including Quality TV: Contemporary American TV and Beyond (2007) and Reading Sex and the City (2004), and more recently, TV’s Betty Goes Global: From Telenovela to International Brand (2013; co-edited with Kim Akass).
The event is organized as a collaboration between Catherine Grant and Janet McCabe from Birkbeck, University of London and Pia Majbritt Jensen and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard from Aarhus University.
To register, please send an e-mail to assistant professor Mathias Bonde Korsgaard (normbk@cc.au.dk) no later than May 10th (you can also register online, see the Transnational Television Drama conference, http://conferences.au.dk/transnationaltelevisiondrama2018/)
