Now we’re getting somewhere

The Centre for International Communication Research (CICR) the Media Industries Research Centre (MIRC) and the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds are inviting you to a 

Conference on Porn Cultures: Regulation, Political Economy, and Technology

Funded by the British Academy

Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th of June in Leeds.

The pornography industry is an under-researched culture industry. Its links to mainstream media and to the sex industry are intensifying. The mainstreaming of certain aspects of the industry in global popular culture raises questions about the adequacy, efficiency or appropriateness of existing policy. Other aspects of the industry, such as its labour conditions, its geographies of production and consumption practices associated with it have largely fallen under the radar of scholarly analysis, while much more attention has been paid to the potential for emancipatory uses of aspects of sexually explicit cultural expression. Meanwhile, technological aspects of the industry’s operation are challenging our assumptions about ‘choice’ ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’. With the proliferation of the pornographic product embedded in everyday life now more than ever before existing and new questions require our urgent attention about human rights, migrants, workers and communication rights, media literacy, media ecology and the public sphere, global production and consumption cultures as well as underlying politics of gender, class and ‘race’.

This conference aims to bring together scholars, policymakers and activists to discuss the global pornography complex. It is the second of two conferences organised within the British Academy funded projectSocialisation of the global sexually explicit imagery: challenges to regulation and research. The project has given birth to an international Porn Cultures and Policy Network, which involves scholars from a number of countries, engaged in comparative studies with an emphasis on policy. We are inviting colleagues to take part in this debate and colleagues who would be interested in working with the existing network to join us. Information on this and our first conference can be found on http://sgsei.wordpress.com.

Please send your 200 word abstract, along with a 50-word bio and contact details to Steven McDermott (cssem@leeds.ac.uk) by March 15th or earlier.

There will be a small fee to cover catering and room facilities. Please let us know if you require an earlier decision regarding your paper. If you would like to discuss a panel/round-table proposal and /or your paper please contact Katharine Sarikakis (K.Sarikakis@leeds.ac.uk).

“BUSINESS STUDIES”

Comentário do Finantial Times, em editorial, a relatório confidencial do Ministério da Inovação, Universidades e Competências britânico: 

“The document contains a nod to the idea that higher education is about more than wealth creation, but no more than a nod. In more than 20 pages, it is dismal to find only one sentence about how education can provide someone with fresh ideas and a better chance at self-fulfilment. It is dispiriting to think that greater prosperity seems to have produced a government mentality that regards understanding primarily as a means to a more productive job rather than an end in itself.”

THE MARKETIZATION OF UNIVERSITIES

The marketisation of universities and some cultural contradictions of academic capitalism 

Hermínio Martins

 

(To all the decent, upright academics I have known)

 

“Sorry: your soul has just died” (Tom Wolfe)

“News from the rat race: the rats have won!” (Car bumper sticker)

 

THE CURRENT COMMITEMENT OF THE BLAIR LABOUR CABINET to a substantial increase in university tuition fees in the UK does not spring solely from the need to address the financial crisis in higher education. It is driven also by the sense that British universities or at least some of them must move towards a US exemplar/myth/utopia of the “world-class research university”, or some version of it, though no clear specification of the goal-state or even of a spectrum of scenarios, appears to have been published as yet. I am not sure whether many, or indeed any, of the distinguished academic backers and co-instigators of this drive share the brutal judgment expressed recently by a former Labour Minister of Education, resident in recent years in Cambridge, Mass., that Britain does not currently possess a single “world-class” university or multiversity, Britain having presumably slipped down into this outer darkness at some oddlyundisclosed point in the recent or perhaps not-so-recent past In fact, the recently published ranking of 500 world universities and 100 European universities, prepared by a team at the Shiao Jong University of Shangai, shows that Britain, as of 2003, was doing very well indeed in the number of universities in fairly high places in the list, in having two universities in the top ten (so part of the la crème de la crème), and four in the top twenty. No matter the merits or demerits of the Higher Education Bill, no matter what happens to it, now or in the next Parliament, the questions I am addressing will remain, possibly in an even more acute form.

 

My concern here is not with the question of the comprehensiveness and equity of access to universities supposedly ensured by the new financial arrangements, important as it is, or with the “output” so unengagingly described by The Financial Times in commending editorially these proposals, as nothing more than improved “intellectual skills of the workforce”. For which purpose, surely, you dont really need universities at all, let alone “elite universities”, as it calls them, and it is worth noting that this proverbial “mouthpiece of capitalism” eschews any additional reference to such desiderata, if not sheer requisites, of a healthy democracy as a well-educated citizenry –indeed the FT does not at all refer to the “citizenry”, or to the “nation”, or to the “people” of Britain, but only to the “workforce” (it seems to imply that the sole matter of concern is the transformation of the studentry into suitable labour market material or the vector studentry→workforce). It altogether fails to invoke the word “education” at all. Indeed, this “world-class” paper failed utterly to mention even any cognate terms such as “culture”, “cultivation”, “civilisation”, “citizenship” (national, European or ecumenic), “formation”, “competences”, “qualities of mind”, “intellectual qualities”, “breadth of understanding”, or even, unbelievably, “knowledge”, all keywords belonging for the last two centuries to the discourse of and about the university, about the higher learning, everywhere in the West (how can we account for the omission of these terms in the FT or the UK government’s statements about the role or the “mission” of the universities or of the expectations they entertain about students?5). “The City’s house journal” did not mention, either, “democratic citizenship”, or some democracy-related facet of education, which would almost certainly have been mentioned, most likely even stressed, on a comparable occasion, by, say, The Wall Street Journal. But in any case, my focus is, rather, on the character of the institutions students are going to have access to, whatkind of “form of life”, what kind of form of academic life, they will be participating in, as well as their teachers.

 

Now the academic advocates of the course referred to are undoubtedly extraordinarily busy people at any time, and the exertion of political pressure, not least on our rulers, is, I am sure, particularly draining (though 10 Downing Street is surely both more accessible and more amenable than the George W. Bush White House in either its first or its second version). So it is not clear whether they have had the opportunity to read, or re-read, anything of an analytical rather than merely encomiastic kind on American universities (it is American universities –and largely a subset of these, in effect- they unceasingly refer to, choosing to ignore other forms of excellence in American higher education, for instance the liberal arts colleges or even the great state universities). I have in mind a couple of works in particular…

 

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