BU Research Blog

Dr Debbie Sadd from the Faculty of Management, is travelling to Japan as a guest of the British Council as a keynote speaker at the Sharing experiences from London 2012 symposium in Tokyo on the 18th December (https://www.britishcouncil.jp/en/events/2020-games-university-symposium).
The Knowledge Partnership, based in London, approached selected UK universities to write case studies around the roles and opportunities they gained from London 2012 and in particular to share experiences and forge a deeper UK-Japan collaboration.
Debbie’s case study of BU’s opportunity to reform the learning environment and curriculum, raise our institution’s reputation, and build our brand image from on-going legacy projects was selected as one of the exemplars for the symposium. There will be over 80 Japanese Universities in attendance as well as members of the Japanese Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.
Debbie will report further once she has returned from her trip.

‘International social work’ – this phrase to those who are interested in the profession and its developments, will either dilate eyes with lit up interest or will be scanned and dismissed as irrelevant to parochial concerns. In our experience it’s simply not a neutral subject, nor an uncontested one but is in fact replete with rich histories, cultural clashes as well as alliances; where grassroots initiatives and discourses engage a guerrilla warfare with dominant hegemonies; where neo-liberal colonialism competes for terrain and influence in poorer nations, wealthy in potential.

These were some of the topics that were discussed both formally and informally at the 2^nd International Social Work Conference 2015 held last week in Penang, Malaysia in collaboration with the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and prestigious Institut Sosial Malaysia. The organising committee was led by under the organisational leadership of our good colleague, Associate Professor Dr Azlinda Azman, Chair of the Social Work Programme at USM.

In our formal affiliation as visiting professors and editorial board members at each institution respectively, we (Profs Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Jonathan Parker) were extremely honoured to be invited to be plenary speakers at this excellent conference with the keynote delivered by Professor Dr Vimla Nadkarni, President of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. This was a star-studded event with an opening speech by Dato’ (Dame) Sri Rohani Abdul Karim, the Minister of the Ministry of Women, Family & Community Development in Malaysia. We were also able to catch up with the President of the Malaysian Association of Social Workers, Teoh Ai Hua, by now an old friend and colleague. We also met Dr Al-Azmi Bakar, Director of the Institut Sosial Malaysia. Sara even managed to catch up with her delightful, former student, Chan Soak Fong, now an elegant, professional woman and prominent social work wheel!

It was also an opportunity to reflect upon the shifting positions of power where Western social work is declining in global influence and the new star of social work rises in the East. Civilisations fade – and in the West we have had our day in the sun, which appropriately enough is setting in this direction. The social work models we developed and imported from Britain (along with those from the USA) during our heyday, have an honoured place in the new world order, but it is quite clear that vigorous pan-Asian paradigms are decentring Western models by taking centre stage in international social work. This trend unfortunately is particularly accelerated by an inward looking stance where the energies of social work in England and Wales seems heavily occupied in negotiating the radical shifts to the profession, which many would argue are jeopardising both its independence, its diverse remit as well as threatening to dilute its intellectual rigour. In the meantime schools of social work in the USA and Australia are jostling aggressively for influence in the Asian world in a neo-colonial push for power bartering their richer resources for a place at the Asian social work table.

It was therefore exciting and important to debate with Professor Nadkarni and other colleagues, these global trends, the opportunities and the threats. We discussed the rise of expertise in Asia, particularly but not specifically located in India, and where in countries like Malaysia social work is being rightly recognised as having great power and influence globally. Accordingly, Asian governments are beginning to recognise its huge potential to help transform national landscapes and therefore to bring international prestige to nations. This seemed symbolised by the media attention the conference commanded, where both the conference and its speakers appeared in all the major newspapers and on national television twice in two days. Sadly social work commands little public or political interest in the historical land of its birth, Britain especially in England, except to focus on deficits, failures and gleeful witch-hunts of hapless social workers caught in the crossfire.

We, in England, can learn much from the Asian experience, however, and the importance of accepting the wisdom of others whilst reigniting the grassroots activism from which much social work was original forged. It changes our position and perspective but perhaps in late modern society this is good for us, challenging us to think differently. For ourselves, our social research in Malaysia, and Southeast Asia as a whole, has opened up exciting vistas for us which we will explore and immerse ourselves in as we move forward into this new age and contest for authentic, impassioned social work, welfare and grassroots action

Sara Ashencaen Crabtree & Jonathan Parker

Communicating Research
FMC Cross-Departmental Seminar Series 2015-16
Time: Wednesday, 9th December, 3-5 pm
Venue: The Screening Room W240, Weymouth House, Talbot Campus.

3-4pm: A Politics and Media Research Centre event:
Dr Jen Birks. University of Nottingham
Adapting to dominant news narratives: tax ‘fairness’ as a Trojan horse for anti-austerity politics

Over the past five years the issue of tax avoidance has broken through into mainstream news media and public debate, after many years in which the campaigning efforts of NGOs, trade unions and a few investigative journalists were met largely with indifference. Protest group UK Uncut have been widely credited with increasing public engagement in the issue. News routines are less reliant on official and elite sources than in the past, and protesters less universally delegitimised in dominant news discourse, but the political claims of social movements still tend to be neglected or reduced to vague or naive opposition. UK Uncut were conscious of the common pitfalls and attempted to fit their own framing of the issue into existing news frames. In presenting a practical alternative to cuts, they hoped to substantiate an argument against the broadly accepted ‘necessity’ of public spending cuts, smuggling an oppositional claim inside a familiar narrative.

Their framing of the issue in terms of compromised political interests and ‘fairness to taxpayers’ fitted with dominant news narratives and was widely adopted by other sources, including the Public Accounts Committee, and by journalists, but generally in terms of individual and organisational wrongdoing and self-interest rather as a systemic critique. This did little to challenge or disrupt the overarching dominant narrative of fiscal crisis, necessary cuts, and even of fair tax as low tax. However, the playful performativity of the protests themselves – although part of an activist repertoire, risking distancing themselves from the mainstream – were successful in achieving some limited press coverage of the cuts that they claimed could be prevented by corporations paying their ‘fair share’, but those arguments were not picked up by other voices.

This paper analyses the extent to which this ‘adaptation’ approach to news framing (Rucht 2013) or intervention in dominant narratives (Hirschkop 1998) was successful in advancing political claims and objectives, and whether this case supports the contention that strategically performative and rhetorical interventions in the public sphere can compensate for marginality and lack of discursive power.

Jen Birks is an Assistant Professor in the department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham, where she teaches political communication and public cultures. She is the author of News and Civil Society (Ashgate 2014).
4-5pm A Narrative Research Group Event

Wednesday 9 December, 4pm
In the second of two special sessions focusing on the international research of Bournemouth academics, Drs Richard Berger and Peri Bradley will be presenting research recently delivered at the 2015 Popular Culture Association Conference.

Richard Berger – Activating Kafka: the double-logic of an adaptation.
In 1962 Orson Welles’ adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, was released to lukewarm reviews. However, right up until his death in 1985, Welles persisted in telling interviewers that The Trial was his greatest film. In 1993, Harold Pinter again adapted the work for film – this time more ‘faithfully’ – and Welles earlier version was drawn back into a critical sphere where it was re-appraised as the definitive Kafka on screen. Far from straying too widely from Kafka’s seminal novel, Orson Welles in fact had a profound understanding of the German-speaking Czech writer’s work, and the his dark nightmarish humour. From Citizen Kane to Chimes at Midnight, the ‘utterance’ of Kafka is visible across all of Welles’ work, which has served to further Kafka’s paratextual ‘afterlife’.

Peri Bradley – Camping Out With Lady Gaga: An Investigation of the Political Potential of Female Camp Performance.
This paper explores the under-researched area of female camp, its relationship to feminism, and its political possibilities for women specifically. Previous studies of Camp and Camp performativity have relied on issues of sensibility and minority positioning – such as Sontag and Isherwood – but here I hope to expand on this original concept to provide a more inclusive definition of Camp that investigates the notion of female Camp as part of a historical and archetypal tradition present in both US and UK media that brings Camp and Camp performance out from the cultural periphery and into the mainstream in a positive – rather than negative way.

*This session will be followed by a festive book launch celebrating a number of recent publications by NRG members. Drinks and nibbles will be served in DG68 from 5-7pm, all very welcome.
About the series
This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, media, communication and marketing studies. The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

Contributions include speakers on behalf of
The Centre for Politics and Media Research
The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community
Narrative Research Group
Journalism Research Group
Advances in Media Management Research Group
Emerging Consumer Cultures Research Group
Public Relations Research Group