Category / Fusion themes

A Talk Session ‘Playable City and Pokemon Go’ 😇 is on the way! 7th November 2019, 11:00-12:00. Venue: EB603

innovation, international, Knowledge Exchange

Invited Speaker: Dr Ema Tanaka (Meiji Unversity, Japan)

Method: Skype meeting

  • The concept of the ‘Playable city’ will be introduced in the community branding context by Dr Tanaka.
  • Dr Tanaka is an ECR who is specialised in the field of transformational future of organisations and human beings in the era of advanced technologies, and one of her main research areas is the well-being of the elderly citizens with Pokemon-Go games in Tokyo. From some empirical studies conducted by the University of Tokyo also suggest that Pokemon Go is contributing to the middle-aged citizens’ well-being.
  • During this talk session, we will discuss ‘a game and the health in the communities’, ‘the movement and the impact of  ‘Sport in life’, and ‘the possibility to support disaster victimised areas (e.g., Fukushima and Kumamoto)’.
  • This session will provide unique topics in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ‘Goal 3: Good Health and well-being’,  ‘Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure’, ’Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities’, and ’Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals’.
  • This session also aligns with BU2025 strategic investment areas (SIAs), Animation, Simulation & Visualisation and Assistive Technology
  • The BU ECRs, PhD researchers, and MSc students are broadly invited to this session.
  • The session will be facilitated by Dr Hiroko Oe with a contributors, Mr. Gideon Adu-Gyamfi and Mr Adriano Manna (MSc International Management).

*For more details, please email to hoe@brounemouth.ac.uk

New BU paper: Health of Nepali migrants in India

international, open access, writing

Today the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health accepted our paper ‘The health of Nepali migrants in India: A qualitative study of lifestyles and risks’ [1].  The research in this paper was funded through Connect India is Bournemouth University’s Hub of Practice for the Indian subcontinent.  It brought together a community of researchers, educators, practitioners and students, both at Bournemouth University and across the Indian subcontinent.

The lead author, Dr. Pramod Regmi, is lecturer in International Health in the Department of Nursing & Clinical Science.  His co-authors are based in the UK, Nepal and India.  BU authors are: Pramod Regmi, Edwin van Teijlingen, Preeti Mahato and Nirmal Aryal as well as BU Visiting Faculty Prof. Padam Simkhada.  The  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an interdisciplinary Open Access journal, hence when published this paper will be freely available to readers across the globe, including India and Nepal.

Reference:

  1. Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E., Mahato, P., Aryal, N., Jadhav, N., Simkhada, P., Syed Zahiruddin, Q., Gaidhane, A., (2019) The health of Nepali migrants in India: A qualitative study of lifestyles and risks Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health (forthcoming)

 

 

FoM academic Mary Beth Gouthro contributes to 2019 MICE Leadership Summit

Business Engagement

Mary Beth Gouthro PhD of the Faculty of Management was invited to join an expert panel for the MICE Leadership Summit 2019 this September at the May Fair Hotel (Edwardian Hotels Group) in London.  Now in its second year, the one day Summit was attended by 200 agents working in the event industry and came from UK, South Africa and Israel.

The MICE (Meetings Incentives Conferencing & Exhibitions) Summit consisted of speakers, the panel and workshop content that addressed the opportunities and challenges of the industry go forward, through to 2025.  The events sector is worth £39.1 billion to the UK economy in terms of direct spend by event delegates, attendees and organisers (BVEP).  Nurturing talent in the workforce as well as issues related to sustainability were key themes covered on the day.

Joining Mary Beth on the panel providing insights to the future proofing for the events sector were Tracy Halliwell MBE, Director of Tourism, Conventions & Major Events for London & Partners; Jamie Vaughan, Head of European Sales for Cvent and Michael Begley, Managing Director of venuedirectory.com.  The panel was chaired by Max Fellows, Director of Client Services at MCI Experience.  The value and role of degree education in the field of events management was furthermore highlighted.  Post-secondary education in the field underpins the economic sustainability of  the International Business Events Action Plan published by DCMS alongside of the Tourism Sector Deal in summer 2019.

The next Summit is planned for September 2020 and plans to incorporate a bigger presence of HE education in event management, ie to include BU students & alumni.

The importance of preservation and sustainability of digital data in the arts

Fusion themes

The AHRC research project, ArtoP: The Visual Articulations of Politics in Nigeria sets out to collect and archive visual material that is produced by artists, animators, filmmakers, photographers in Nigeria around and following the elections in February 2019. As part of the project outputs, the research will culminate in a digital archive that will serve two purposes i) to preserve this collection over a period of 10 years and ii) to disseminate parts of the collection with a wider public through a web-based platform. These outputs present a number of challenges that highlight the importance of planning for digital archiving and ensuring its sustainability given the rapidity with which digital traces are created, disseminated and in turn disappear (Ernst, 2013). This post forms part of a longer paper in development that seeks to focus upon changes in archival practice in the arts, especially where contexts of contemporary image making practices tend to be based in the digital and circulate in virtual spaces. Additionally, the variances in technological landscapes across different geographies also present separate sets of challenges that a researcher may face – who has access to this data; which voices are included and excluded; how does one curate for fair access?  

Collecting Digital Images

In 2018, the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) ran an exhibition on ‘Art in the Age of the Internet’, that examined how ‘the internet has radically changed the field of art, especially in its production, distribution, and reception’ (Respini, 2018). This exhibition is connected to a wider ongoing discourse within the arts on digital media (Gere, 2004, 2006) and the impact this is having upon museums and galleries. Therefore it is not surprising to see that in recent years there has been a growing recognition of the urgent need to actively collect and preserve digital art and digital graphics – material which is inherently ephemeral.  Archives have been tempted to wait until a top down collections management system is developed. This has resulted in gaps in collections.There is a consensus emerging that researchers and archivists urgently need to take a DIY, active approach to collecting digital content as near to the time of its publication as possible. Unlike physical collections, there is less chance of acquiring large collections of digital content at a later date, long after the material was created. This is because material on digital platforms are fleeting, with people entrusting storage of their digital creations to third-party proprietorial platforms whose commitment to the long term preservation of material is uncertain:     

“Digital works increasingly operate within a culture that replaces ownership with access. The idea that anything is accessible anytime online changes the motivation to collect and archive within the personal sphere. Personal cultural material is now embedded in proprietary software and third party platforms where responsibility for its longevity in a fast changing technological environment is ambiguous. Certainly, the ability to capture the online object within the context which makes it meaningful recedes as time passes […] digital collecting is best approached as a process of rapid response.” (CCDP 2018) 

One only needs to think of the demise of Myspace, a once-popular social media platform and a medium for sharing artwork and music, which recently lost all content uploaded by users before 2016, to recognise how transient and vulnerable our individual and collective digital heritage is. (Hern  2019)

Capturing Context and Circulation

Another challenge in collecting and archiving digital images and artworks is capturing the contexts and the patterns of circulation which make the images meaningful. Simply saving a digital graphic as an individual image file severs the image from its context. One challenge has been in capturing the interactive web environments in which digital graphics are published, republished and commented upon by users of Web 2.0. The sharing and modification of images online by a variety of actors is increasingly rapid and dynamic. For example, people can change the meaning of an image by reposting it on social media with a different caption, presenting new opportunities for engaged political citizenship and satire (Agbo 2018). This, along with the growing availability of digital editing tools, which are often embedded within the interface of social media platforms themselves, also allow users to easily edit the visual content of images, leaving them ripe for subversion and parody. Social media users quickly respond to each other in a humorous, conversational form, in ways which reframe images, reference earlier posts and trade ‘in-jokes’. In such exchanges users demonstrate their visual literacy and quick textual wit (Dike 2018). As both the content and context of digital images is endlessly mutating, it doesn’t make sense to archive once instance of an image, or even to think in terms of individual images. A recent report by the Collecting and Curating Digital Posters (CCDP) project recommends thinking in terms of “graphic events” rather than discrete images in order to reflect the ongoing social practices in which images are referenced, negotiated and transformed.  We should capture many iterations of the same image, the way in which they have migrated, the online environments in which they are encountered, and the ways audiences have interacted and commented on the images. The CCDP project recommends using the open-source tool Web-Recorder, in which collectors ‘record’ a web session, allowing them to capture their experience of browsing a website, trace the circulation of images online and record the ways in which it was possible to interact with digital graphics within native software and social media environments. These ‘sessions’ can be saved and played back by future users of the archive using the open source Web Recorder Player.  

There are problems in capturing such phenomenon in retrospect.  The rapidly changing appearance and technological environment of social media platforms introduces temporal distortion when searching social media platforms for, say, memes produced in response to a particular political controversy in 2014. We need to capture such phenomena as soon as possible. This requires us to be active and embedded users of the web in order to spot emerging visual trends as they occur.      

‘The archival infrastructure in the case of the Internet is only ever temporary, in response to its permanent dynamic rewriting. Ultimate knowledge (the old encyclopedia model) gives way to the principle of permanent rewriting or addition. ‘ (Ernst, 2013:85)

Storage and Access: Open Source Solutions.

‘Our obsession with memory functions as a reaction formation against the accelerating technical processes that our transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in quite distinct ways. [Memory] represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation, and fast-speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload’. (Husseyn, 1994)

Any discussion of a digital archive necessitates an active engagement with technological apparatus in order to consider the relationship between a technological environment and the production of (and obsession with) memory (Husseyn 1994). Storage and preservation are key aspects to any discussion on digital archiving, and as digital technologies accelerate their pace of change, paradoxically, so must a digital archive respond to this by mitigating against it. 

Storage and preservation

A question we faced in designing the ArtoP project was which software we should use for digital preservation and storage. Digital preservation can be difficult as the file formats we may take for granted now can become obsolescent in future – the software which opens them can disappear, rendering the contents of a file irretrievable. We therefore wanted to ensure that material was packaged in stable file formats, adhered to widely agreed-upon archival standards, and was stored securely. We identified Archivematica as the ideal software for our purposes. 

Archivematica is an open source, web-based digital preservation system that is used by a variety of institutions. The fact that the software is open access and free to install and operate actually ensures greater longevity. Proprietary software, tied to the variable fortunes of individual companies, are more liable to disappear than open source projects, which enjoy the support of an active community of users and developers. 

Archivematica is not a single piece of software but rather an ecosystem containing a number of tools, components and specifications which run the ‘microservices’ necessary to preserve digital content. For example, one of the microservices performed by Archivematica is called ‘normalisation’. During normalisation the files you upload are converted into preservation-friendly formats, using an active list of stable and accessible file formats compiled and updated by the UK National Archives. This provides some insurance against the rapid cycles of change and obsolescence which characterise the life of file formats. 

Archivematica’s core functions are as follows: 

  • User submits data to Archivematica in the form of Submission Information Packages (SIPs)
  • From the SIPs, Archivematica creates Archival Information Packages (AIPs) for the long term preservation of data.
  • Archivematica stores (and backs up) AIPs
  • Archivematica creates Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs) to export content to populate an archival access system, such as Access to Memory (AtoM), Archive Space, Figleaf etc.

Ensuring Access

As mentioned earlier, another priority of the project was to make a selected range of images from the archive available for public consumption through a public archive hosted on a web-based platform. Increasingly users of archives wish to be able to actively interact with collections and desire wider access (Fossati 2009), challenges which digital access and display offers potential solutions to.  For this process we are opting for the web-based access platform Access to Memory (AtoM).  

Like Archivematica, AtoM is open source – it is free to use, free to share and free to develop. All documentation is freely available online. This is complemented by a supportive community of users, who communicate and solve problems using a google mailing list, as well as by congregating in person at the UK User Group’s meetings, which are attended by a number of archivists and librarians from prestigious UK universities.

AtoM supports the use of a choice of widely agreed-upon archival standards for describing archival objects. This enables digital images to be presented along with explanatory context, or metadata, crucial to its understanding. Using archival descriptive standards also means there is the potential for us to link the material to larger aggregators of archival holdings, and material on our access page could be discovered by people using archival search portals such as Archives Hub.

Crucially, AtoM is also integrated into Archivematica – the two systems were developed by the same company and are configured to ‘speak’ to one another.  Archivematica produces Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs) that can populate AtoM with images, video and metadata. 

We also liked how AtoM can be customised according to the diverse needs of different organisations and audiences. We aim to hold workshops in Lagos to ask for feedback from Nigerians as to how they think material should be described and presented to the public, and we will attempt to customise our AtoM page accordingly. Rather than projecting our own assumptions on the material by presenting it in certain ways, we are eager to have this determined by local knowledge and needs, as well as local technological landscapes (see below). Moreover, Atom features multi-lingual support, with the potential to add translations, making the material relevant to different audiences. Our aspiration is for the public side of the archive to be a resource for Nigerian citizens, artists and researchers. 

We are inspired by the wide range of institutions that have used and customised AtoM in creative and innovative ways to present visual context, ranging from the Glasgow School of Arts to The Chinese Canadian Artefacts Project. We are currently exploring and brainstorming ways of customising AtoM. 

Local technological landscapes 

One of the considerations we need to bear in mind when customising our web-based access system is the local technological landscapes used by our primary audience: Nigerians. Digital technology has been harnessed by Nigerian artists and citizens to make political critiques, and has afforded Nigerians with new strategic opportunities to produce and circulate indigenous knowledge within global flows of information. Many Nigerians primarily access the internet using smartphones. Thus we need to consider designing our web-based access system in ways which are suitable for mobile browsers.  Additionally, to align with the UN Sustainability Development Goals, we are keen to ensure that access to this archive for educational purposes is designed for Nigerian users and their specific technological landscape, in order for it to have the greatest impact in Nigeria (and other African countries). Therefore, we also need to ensure that our website is accessible to users whose bandwidth may be limited and for whom mobile data is a significant expense. This might involve customising file normalisation in Archivematica in order to produce lower resolution image and video files for access purposes, which will load much quicker for users with slower internet connections or limited data. 

We are still in a development phase and will be researching the local technological landscape in Nigeria further, as well as soliciting advice from Nigerians as to the form our access system should take. 

In the meantime we wanted to take this opportunity to share our experiences, and hope to forge new relations with academics that may also be considering approaches to digital archiving. We hope to see our research extending to considering a range of formats and elements that may contribute to the generation of digital still or moving images and that sit within a more complex pipelines such as those in CGI for example, and the implications of this to archival practices.

Therefore, any feedback from readers of this blogpost is of course welcome – please contact 

PI Dr. Paula Callus – pcallus@bournemouth.ac.uk

CoI Dr. Charles Gore – cg2@soas.ac.uk

RA Dr. Malcolm Corrigall – mcorrigall@bournemouth.ac.uk

Bibliography

Agbo, George Emeka, (2018).  “The Struggle Complex: Facebook, Visual Critique and the tussle for Political Power in Nigeria” Cariers D’étude Africaines 230, pp.469-89.

CCDP, (2018). Collecting and Curating Digital Posters Handbook, https://ccdgp.co.uk/index.html.  

Dike, Deborah N. (2018), “Countering Political Narratives through Nairaland Meme Pictures” Cahiers D’étude Africaines 230: pp.493–512

Ernst, W. (2013), Digital Memory and the Archive, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Gere, C. (2006), Art, Time and Technology, Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Fossati, G. (2009), From Grain to Pixel, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Hern, A. (2019) “Myspace loses all content uploaded before 2016”, The Guardian, March 18.  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-loses-all-content-uploaded-before-2016 

Haskins, E. (2007), ‘Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age’, in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol.37, pp. 401-422.

Huyssen A. (1994), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, London p.253.

 

Assistive Technology Symposium 2019

conferences

Dr Huseyin Dogan and Dr Paul Whittington from the BU Human Computing Interaction Research Group, hosted the second Assistive Technology Symposium at Talbot Campus in support of the BU2025 Strategic Investment Area of Assistive Technology. The Symposium was a fusion of research domains, including digital health, education technologies and user experience.

The Symposium was opened by a keynote presentation by Steve Tyler, Assistive Technology Director at Leonard Cheshire, who discussed the current developments in Assistive Technologies and the potential challenges. Steve also described the Leonard Cheshire projects, including MySense, a Predictive Health Analytics system that non-intrusively monitors to provide a holistic view of the person.

Other presentations during the day included the current BU research projects of SmartAbility and FACETS, as well as by the BU Additional Learning Support department, who discussed learning strategies through metacognition. We also welcomed speakers from the Dorset Integrated Care System, London Grid for Learning and Diversity and Ability. The Symposium was concluded by a panel discussion with the speakers, to discuss the developments and challenges of assistive technology.

The Symposium delegates have expressed positive feedback from the event, including “a number of very useful and insightful presentations”, “the Symposium was beneficial because it was an opportunity to meet like-minded people” and “good to know what is going on at BU”.

BUHCI would like to thank all of the speakers and delegates for a successful Assistive Technology Symposium and we will host the third Symposium in 2020.

The presentations from the Symposium can be downloaded here.

New paper published: Rihova, I., Moital, M., Buhalis, D. and Gouthro, M. (2019), “Practice-based segmentation: taxonomy of Customer to Customer (C2C) co-creation practice segments”, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,  https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-01-2018-0096

New paper published: Rihova, I., Moital, M., Buhalis, D. and Gouthro, M. (2019), “Practice-based segmentation: taxonomy of Customer to Customer (C2C) co-creation practice segments“, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,  https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-01-2018-0096

Abstract

This paper aims to explore and evaluate practice-based segmentation as an alternative conceptual segmentation perspective that acknowledges the active role of consumers as value co-creators. Data comprising various aspects of customer-to-customer (C2C) co-creation practices of festival visitors were collected across five UK-based festivals, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews with naturally occurring social units (individuals, couples and groups). Data were analysed using a qualitative thematic analysis procedure within QSR NVivo 10. Private, sociable, tribal and communing practice segments are identified and profiled, using the interplay of specific subject- and situation-specific practice elements to highlight the “minimum” conditions for each C2C co-creation practice.

C2C

Unlike traditional segments, practice segment membership is shown to be fluid and overlapping, with fragmented consumers moving across different practice segments throughout their festival experience according to what makes most sense at a given time. Although practice-based segmentation is studied in the relatively limited context of C2C co-creation practices at festivals, the paper illustrates how this approach could be operationalised in the initial qualitative stages of segmentation research. By identifying how the interplay of subject- and situation-specific practice elements affects performance of practices, managers can facilitate relevant practice-based segments, leading to more sustainable business. The paper contributes to segmentation literature by empirically demonstrating the feasibility of practice-based segments and by evaluating the use of practice-based segmentation on a strategic, procedural and operational level. Possible methodological solutions for future research are offered.

C2C

BU medical science in top immunology journal, ‘Immunity’.

Fusion themes

 

Colleagues at Cornell University and I have used the fruit fly, Drosophila to tease apart the relationship between immunity and the gut microbiome. The work (which took six years to complete) is to be published in Immunity (impact factor 20 for the ‘metricists’ out there) and has major significance because it starts to explain how the human immune response ‘tolerates’ the billions of ‘good’ bacteria in our body.

Many animals carry billions of bacteria in their intestines which are critical for the digestion of ingested foods. This poses a problem for immune cells because signs of the bacteria regularly end up outside the gut and in circulation. Normally, bacterial signals would elicit a powerful immune system but it would be bad news if the gut microbiome was targeted for destruction by immune cells. How this cordial relationship is maintained is therefore of major interest to immunologists and medical science because it has implications for how we understand inflammatory diseases.

We show for the first time that cells called nephrocytes remove bacterial signals (proteoglycans that make bacterial cell walls) from circulation and that this dampens immune responses. Disruption of this removal system causes immune cells to be over-active – a state not unlike chronic inflammation.

I’m duty bound as a basic scientist to make the point that this work also impacts our understanding of insect ecology. Having an over-active immune system shortened the lifespan of Drosophila – an effect likely to be seen in ecologically and medically important species such as honeybees and mosquitoes. How immune responses are affected by the environment in these species is also a very hot topic of research – one that can also be modeled in Drosophila.

Best wishes,

Paul Hartley (Dept of Life and Environmental Sciences)

Media Literacy vs Fake News – recommendations from CEMP research

Awarded & submitted bids, Post-award, Publishing

As many as possible of the citizens of a democracy must be not only literate but critically literate if they are to behave as full citizens. (Hoggart, 2004: 189)

CEMP have published the outcomes of an ethnography funded by the United States Embassy in London, consisting of a field review, 25 interviews and four multi-stakeholder workshops, bringing together and capturing dialogue between media educators, journalists, students and information professionals, to address the educational response to ‘fake news’ and disinformation.

25 interviews with media educators and journalists were transcribed and analysed for key discursive patterns. Participative workshops were held at the Media Education Summit in Hong Kong, the English and Media Centre in London, the National Higher Research University in Moscow and Loughborough University’s campus at Olympic Park, London.  The total sample, including the interviews and participants in the workshops, is 88, across the four stakeholder groups.

See the project site for the field review, workshop videos, presentations, participant blog, report, recommendations and the ‘top ten’ toolkit of media literacy resources selected by the stakeholders for dealing with fake news.

At the major event in London, with additional sponsorship from the Media Education Association, two days of activities in London at the Olympic Park on 15th and 16th March 2019 brought together the four stakeholder groups for a public event consisting of keynote presentations and a panel comprised of the US and UK academics involved in the project – Professor David Buckingham, Professor Monica Bulger, Professor Paul Mihaildis, Dr Karen Fowler-Watt and Dr Roman Gerodimos.

The workshop was designed to generate dialogue on four issues: (1) clarifying the problem (the apparent ‘information disorder’) from lived experience of the stakeholders; (2) identifying any competing or partly integrated discourses around the concept of trust in media and information; (3) evaluating a range of educational resources already in the world – we called this ‘testing the wheel’ and (4) agreeing on what media education can realistically do, to move beyond ‘solutionism’ (Buckingham, 2019) towards a more viable, modest proposal for Fake News vs Media Studies. Where do / can we have agency?

From the findings of the project, we make the argument that critical media literacy, if adopted as a mandatory subject in schools and taught as a dynamic literacy education, would better equip young citizens with resilience to ‘information disorder’ (Wardle and Derekhshan, 2017) than reactive resources (such as fact-checking and verification tools) and small-scale projects which focus primarily on competences. The latter are described, metaphorically, as ‘giving a fish’, the former are described as ‘teaching to fish’. To use an alternative analogy, the former boosts the immune system, the latter treat the infection (see Rushkoff, 2018).

Both are needed, but ‘teaching to fish’ is the key recommendation, and, in the UK schools’ context, making Media Studies a mandatory subject would be the obvious starting point.

The workshop identified a ‘top ten’ of media literacy resources for dealing with information disorder. These include more holistic, critical media literacy activities (Teaching to Fish) – a more effective and sustainable approach than ‘giving a fish’ through fact-checking tools or surface level media / information literacy competences.

The data generated from the field review, interviews and workshops, taken together, lead us to the following three recommendations:

(1) Rather than producing competence frameworks for media literacy, as though it is a neutral set of skills for citizens, media education needs to enable students to apply the critical legacies of both Media Studies and literacy education on the contemporary media ecosystem;

(2) Media education must adopt a dynamic approach to media literacy and increase the experiential, reflexive aspects of media practice in the curriculum, with reciprocal transfer between the critical rhetorics above and creative media practice in order to respond, academically, to media as primarily a question of representation. In other words, resilience to representation is enhanced by expertise in representing.

(3) We need to add the critical exploration of social media, algorithms and big data to the media education curriculum, accompanied by applied practical learning in the uses of them for social justice, as opposed to training the next generation in the use of these for even further commercial and political exploitation of one another.

New book by BU academics on re-imagining journalism receives endorsements from industry, the academy and international community

Publishing

Karen Fowler-Watt and Stephen Jukes are excited to share their new book: New Journalisms: Rethinking Practice, Theory and Pedagogy, which is published as paperback and e-book by Routledge this week.

It has received a range of endorsements from within the academy, industry and our international partners:

New Journalisms invites an important conversation about the future of news reporting, inspiring us to revisit familiar perspectives, challenge our assumptions, and forge fresh approaches. Taken together the chapters set in motion a dazzling array of critiques, each informed by an impassioned commitment to reinvent journalism anew in the public interest. Essential reading.

  • Professor Stuart Allan, Cardiff University

New Journalisms provides us with a much-needed road map, making a vital contribution to the debate about how to reboot journalism for this age of technological, economic and editorial disruption.

  • Stephen Sackur, Hard Talkpresenter, BBC World News and BBC News Channel

Bring together incredible faculty, journalists and students from five continents to reinvent media and you have the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. Over a dozen years the Academy has driven a global movement for media literacy, turned news consumers into producers, encouraged social entrepreneurship, and challenged scholars to rethink everything they thought they knew. Arising from this intellectual wind tunnel, New Journalisms offers thinking we desperately need to address information overload and manipulation.

  • Stephen Salyer, President & CEO, Salzburg Global Seminar

The plural in New Journalisms is important in that the edited collection focuses on not only new challenges facing journalism (in the singular) but also seeks to capture a range of new practices that are being employed across a diversity of media. The book explores how these new practices can lead to a re-imagining of journalism in terms of practice, theory and pedagogy.

It forms part of a media literacy series, Routledge Research in Media Literacy and Education, co-edited by CEMP’s Professor Julian McDougall, https://cemp.ac.uk. The book takes an innovative approach in its aim to challenge the normative discourse about practice, theory and pedagogy through encouraging contributors from industry and the academy to re-imagine journalism in all its forms.

It brings together high-profile academics, emerging researchers and well-known journalism practitioners. These include some leading figures in the field. Many of them come together each year at the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change: https://www.salzburgglobal.org/multi-year-series/media-academy . This global alliance of activist scholars, media makers and experimental educators, shares values reflecting a school of thought that advocates transformative pedagogies and practices, which also support civic impact. Given the current period of uncertainty and introspection in the media, the book represents a timely intervention in the debate about journalism but also aims to have a sustainable impact due to its forward-looking nature.

Not for the first time, journalism is in a period of introspection. This time, however, it is not about ‘drinking in the last chance saloon’ as a result of self-inflicted wounds after the phone hacking scandal and ensuing Leveson inquiry. Today, the crisis facing the media comes from external forces, whether it be attacks from the U.S. president, the rising voice of partisan opinion or narratives of fear. Established media appears to be drowned out and ‘the people who want to see journalism fail now have a bigger megaphone than ever’ (Bell, 2017). The Internet has perversely reinforced personal opinion as the public consumes what it wants to hear. The Internet has thus, in part, failed to deliver on the connectivity it promised.

Against this landscape, the edited collection explores a series of key themes and objectives:

− New challenges: towards a definition of ‘new journalisms’, those challenges presented by a crisis of professional identity, changing patterns of consumption and engagement with news, and issues arising from public disaffection with elites, journalism and the media

− New practices: ways of connecting publics through listening to marginalised voices, the increased potential of alternative journalisms, the impact of analytics, considering how journalists handle the rise of violent and graphic images,

− Re-imagining: how journalism education can lead to new journalisms, how to engage people in an age of distrust, pedagogies to enhance an understanding of narratives of terror and threats to human rights, teaching new ways of telling human stories.

Karen and Stephen will be discussing the book in a ‘salon’ at the Salzburg Media Academy in late July and they are hosting an official launch at BU as part of a journalism education symposium for CEMP’s Journalism Education Research Group on October 10th (2-5pm in the EBC).

Author biographies:

Dr Karen Fowler-Watt is a senior principal academic at Bournemouth University where she is research theme lead for journalism education in the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice. As a BBC journalist and editor for Radio 4 News and Current Affairs, she worked in Moscow, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the United States. Her research focuses on questions of empathy and voice with specific interest in reimagining journalism education, trauma awareness, and conflict reporting. She works with the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change and is engaged in a pedagogy project with Global Voices. https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/kfowler-watt

Stephen Jukes is Professor of Journalism in the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University. He worked in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters before moving into the academic world in 2005. His research focuses on areas of objectivity and emotion in news with an emphasis on affect, trauma, and conflict journalism. He works with the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change, chairs the Dart Centre for Journalism & Trauma in Europe, and is a trustee of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/sjukes