Tagged / Kip Jones

Sociological Cinema recommends Jones’ short video for teaching

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The Sociological Cinema, (“designed to help sociology instructors incorporate videos into their classes”) has recently recommended one of Dr Kip Jones’ (HSC and the Media School) earliest stabs at visualizing research data via audio/visual production.  Produced in his bedsit and in a friend’s studio in Leicester, Jones used photographs on loan from the National Trust and dialogue retrieved in his PhD research on informal care to produce this short A/V work on an antiquated PC, using an inexpensive camera to film it.

The Sociological Cinema suggests that ‘I Can Remember the Night’ ‘could be useful in a class on cognitive sociology, highlighting how cognitive processes, such as memory, are shaped by socio-cultural events, such as divorce. In addition to using the clip as a way to interrogate biography and narrative as sociological methods of research, the clip could also be a nice launching pad from which to introduce an assignment where students create their own videos, using their own biographical narratives as a window through which to explore larger sociological phenomena, much in the way C.W. Mills suggested’.

The video itself is available on Vimeo and portrays “Polly”, a 65 year old woman from the Midlands in the UK, who recalls the time as a child when her parents sat her down and asked her which of them she wanted to be with. Her story, re-narrated by three players, represents how this traumatic event became an enduring memory throughout the various stages of her life.

Polly’s story is also told in more depth in two academic journal articles:

Jones, K. (2006) “Informal Care as Relationship: the Case of the Magnificent Seven” Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing, 13: 214-220.

Jones, K. (2005) “The Art of Collaborative Storytelling: arts-based representations of narrative contexts”. Invited paper for: International Sociological Association Research Committee on Biography and Society RC38 Newsletter, October 2005.

Other audio/video productions are also freely available on Jones’ Vimeo pages.

The KIPWORLD blog and website offer further resources.

‘Popularizing Research’ published with opening Chapter by BU’s Kip Jones on Performative Social Science

BU research

Peter Lang Publishing announces the publication of Popularizing Research: Engaging New Genres, Media, and Audiences, edited by Phillip Vannini of Canada’s Royal Roads University.

The book’s opening Chapter, “Short Film as Performative Social Science: The Story Behind “’Princess Margaret’” was written by Dr Kip Jones, Reader in Qualitative Research and Performative Social Science, who shares a joint appointment in HSC and the Media School. The Chapter outlines his fascinating and innovative approach to research and its dissemination via a fusion of the arts and social sciences.

Jones utilizes his chapter to recount an unconventional journey to academic publishing that certainly did not follow the usual route of journal or book publication. The Chapter revisits “The one about Princess Margaret”, one of Jones’ earliest attempts at audio/visual script writing, by recalling his initial motivation and enthusiasm for finding innovative ways to express scholarship and how his thinking about the use of tools from the arts in social science has evolved since those early days. These personal experiences are then offered up as advice in a summation for both social scientists and arts practitioners who may be interested in this new paradigm of Performative Social Science through a discussion about collaboration and pathways to impact.

Popularizing Research offers academics, professional researchers, and students a new methodological book/website hybrid by way of a broad survey of ways to popularize research. As an edited interdisciplinary book accompanied by a website featuring samples of popularized research, it will have the potential of not only telling its readers about new genres, new media, new strategies, and new imperatives for popularizing research, but most importantly it will also be useful in showing how these new processes work in the end, what they sound like, and what they look like.

For more information and to view the video representing Jones’ contribution to the book, see his page on the book’s website under ‘Film’.

Come along to the BU-research based short-film ‘Rufus Stone’ screening & lunch on Tuesday

BU research

Pictured: Tom Kane, who plays 'Flip', Rufus' young friend, and Harry Kershaw as 'Rufus'.

Rufus Stone: a film about love, sexual awakening and treachery (30 minutes).
The Making of Rufus Stone: (7 minutes).
Tuesday 28 February
12:00 noon: Complimentary lunch
12:45- 13:45: Screening of films
Weymouth House 240 & 241
Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University 

A screening of the short film Rufus Stone is open to BU students, staff, the public and takes place on Tuesday 28 February at 12:45 in our Hollywood-style Screening Room on BU’s Talbot Campus. Complimentary lunch will be available beforehand from 12 noon. You must register to attend at: diversity@bournemouth.ac.uk

Rufus Stone stars William Gaunt, familiar to many from his appearances in the TV sitcom, No Place Like Home and Elle Magazine’s ‘Star in the Making’ Harry Kershaw, both playing Rufus at different periods in his life story.

There will be time for discussion following the screening of the films with

Dr Kip Jones Executive Producer, Reader in Qualitative Research, HSC and a behind the scenes look at The Making of Rufus Stone with Trevor Hearing, The Media School.

As featured in The New York Times during its world premiere in 2011, Rufus Stone is a film which draws its story from three years of in-depth research to give an account of being gay and growing older in the British countryside. The film is now available for wider audiences to enjoy in Dorset and Hampshire as part of BU’s annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) History month, celebrating the lives and achievements of the LGBT community.

Rufus Stone is an innovative approach to a research three-year research project, ‘Gay and Pleasant Land?’ led by BU academic, Dr Kip Jones.  The project, about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales, is a work package in the UK-wide New Dynamics of Ageing Project ‘Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society’, funded by Research Councils UK.

Directed by award-winning Josh Appignanesi and produced by Parkville Pictures, the stories which form the foundation of the script for Rufus Stone are entirely based upon research undertaken by Dr Jones and his team from BU’s School of Health and Social Care (HSC) with the assistance of a citizens’ advisory committee. The film’s ‘fictional’ story was created over time using composite characters and situations, all uncovered in the ‘Gay and Pleasant Land?’ research project, through in-depth biographic life story interviews, focus groups, and actual site visits to the rural locations where older gay or lesbian citizens were living.

“Our hope is that the film will dispel many of the myths surrounding ageing, being gay and life in British rural settings,” said Jones, in his role as Executive Producer of Rufus Stone. “The film renders poetically the way in which our memories morph and play with our histories, much as dappled sunlight reveals, then conceals, an idyllic landscape”.

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