August | 2015 | CCCI@City

Andy and Janet give presentations in Oxford

Andy Pratt and Janet Merkel were in Oxford last week to attend the 4th Global Conference on Economic Geography, a conference series that only takes place every four years and that attracted over 700 participants. This year’s theme has been “Mapping Economies in Transformation“. While Janet presented a paper on “Co-working spaces as new resilient…

Ros and Jo give talks in Dublin

Ros Gill and Jo Littler were in Dublin in late June for the international Console-ing Passions conference. Ros presented a paper co-authored by Christina Scharff and Ana Sofia Elias from King’s, articulating a new perspective on aesthetic labour. Jo presented a paper on the mumpreneur which considered the gendering of neoliberalism and the meanings of…

Andy Pratt discusses Shoreditch on BBC Radio London

Hackney Council is considering changes to licensing laws in trendy night spot Shoreditch. In no small part the reason is due to the gentrification of the area, whose new residents like the image but not the actuality of a party on their doorstep. Andy spoke to the Breakfast programme on 12 Aug to take the…

Jenny Mbaye features in What’s On Africa

Jenny Mbaye was recently interviewed by Rachel Stella Jenkins for the blog What’s On Africa, brought by the Royal African Society. This interview offers a personal reflection on the link between cultural economies and creative cities in African contexts. http://whatsonafrica.org/interview-dr-jenny-mbaye/

Ambient Play

Ros was at an EU COST Workshop in June, held at the Australian University RMIT’s sumptuous Barcelona headquarters (see image). The symposium sought to address the new types of labour, creativity and play emerging around mobile media and games. Drawing upon empirically grounded and theoretically informed analyses of phenomena such as Let’s Play (shared videos…

Ros Gill in Canada: presentation on academic labour

Ros has just returned from Canada where she took part in a conference about academic labour, audit culture and the future of Universities. Other speakers included Noam Chomsky (by video), Yvonna Lincoln, Leigh Patel, Eve Tuck and Michelle Fine. The conference was organized by Marc Spooner and more information can be found here at www.politicsofevidence.ca

Leading media academics challenge anti-BBC consultation

Leading UK media academics have written a collective letter warning of the skewed terms of reference of the Green Paper on BBC charter review. They argue that the remit is so preoccupied with an assumed negative impact of the BBC on the commercial media market that they ignore the considerable evidence of the BBC’s enormous contribution…