Pod Academy

Hello!

My name's Dave Pickering and I make the weekly podcast Getting Better Acquainted where I record conversations with people I know,

Part interview show, part oral history project, the show was nominated for a 2012 Radio Production Award, goes out regular on Resonance 104.4 FM and was featured on the Radio 5 Live podcast special, Helen and Olly's Required Listening.

In GBA 41 I got better acquainted with Chris. He was my one of my lecturers at university but I hadn't seen him since I'd graduated. We talked about academia, journalism, media, the Iraq War and government cuts. It was recorded on a university campus so it was a trip down memory lane where I faced my past lessons and past prejudices.

It's a conversation about ideas but also about people. Chris charts his journey from plumber to van driver to academic and critic. And he makes the argument for how, in a world so influenced and controlled by the media, media studies is far from being an irrelevant subject.

If you liked this conversation with Chris you might want to check out some of my other conversations, the other conversations with academics are collected here, and there are conversations with all kinds of people available in the main feed fom iTunes, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

“Biography is actually a quest for lives that speak to us” said biographer Hermione Lee.

So what is the role of the biopic in contemporary film culture? What is it that we are looking for in the increasingly popular 'biopic' genre - films like Selma, Diana, Saving Mr Banks, 12 Years a Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street that claim to be based on real life events and aim to depict episodes in the lives of their protagonists?

Pod Academy's film specialist, Esther Gaytan Fuertes, went to talk to Tom Brown and Belen Vidal, two lecturers in Film Studies at King’s College London, about their recent book, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, to find out more about this genre.

Esther started by asking them if they felt the biopic was a neglected area in Film Studies.

 Belen Vidal: Well, yes and no – it’s been studied but yes, perhaps it hasn’t been studied enough. The thing is that the biopic as a genre has always been there, I mean, it goes back to the beginning of film history.

1915 Birth of a Nation about Abraham Lincoln

But the biopic has also cropped up as part of other genres and that’s the way it’s been looked at mainly by scholars -  as biopics that were part of the musical genre, or gangster films or Westerns... All those genres would have biographical elements or would occasionally do stories that are based on real characters, or real lives or people that existed. So, in a way, there’s been forming an idea of the biopic throughout film history as part of the popular genres, but the truth is that when Tom and I came into this project we also did it because we were interested that, in all this time, basically what we have is only two books, which are two excellent starting points to study the biopic, but it seemed very little considering the popularity of the genre.

It’s worth mentioning that the first book that took the genre seriously or did a kind of serious comprehensive approach was George Custen’s book called Bio/pics: How Hollywood constructed public history – this was a book on the classical biopic, mostly films made in the 30s and 40s, and it focused on Hollywood. After that, recently we’ve had a book coming out by Dennis Bingham [Whose Lives are they Anyway?] about the biopic in contemporary film culture. And again this is a book that tackles the modern biopic - the biopic since the post war period and up to the contemporary moment. But, again, it’s very heavily leaned towards the English language. So we thought, why not doing a kind of more reviewing of the biopic in the last twenty years especially and how also the genre has spread, has become more visible internationally? Because what Tom and I were struck by was the huge number of films coming from very different national cinemas all marketing themselves as biographical films and many of them very often being immensely popular. If we think about La Môme (that was called La Vie en Rose) here, a French film about a French singer, Edith Piaf, making it all the way to the Oscars, all the way up to kind of the big time in Hollywood and it’s distributed all over the world. What were the conditions that were creating this appetite for biographical narratives and how these films are now becoming much more visible not only from Hollywood but from all over the world? So we wanted to study this phenomenon and say something about the biopic in contemporary film culture and that’s what the book is about.

What approach do you adopt in your book to study the biopic?

Belen Vidal: What we are really interested also is in the narrative structures, in the tropes that recur time and again. Is there such a thing as the poetics of the contemporary biopic? Is there such a thing as a kind of certain structures that are being used and reused time and again, new genres forming...? That’s what we were interested in when we were looking at the different chapters and bringing th...

If newspapers' online production is taking over from print - how should they be regulated?  They carry video and audio, yet are not subject to the same constraints as broadcast media.  This is the issue addressed by Hugh Linehan (twitter: @hlinehan), Digital Development Director of the Irish Times in this, the second half of his lecture at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media.

The first half of the lecture, Hugh says, 'I work in a dying industry' and considers how newspapers can construct a business model that will fund good quality journalism. That podcast can be found here.

Is the need for ritual hard-wired into human beings?

From a Cherokee medicine man smoking a pipe to Sufi mystics whirling in ecstasy or Pope Francis celebrating mass – different as they may seem, all of these people engage in a form of religious ritual. There are even secular rituals, such as the chanting on football terraces. Wherever you go in the world, you will find people engaging in some form of ritual.

What is it that makes rituals so universally meaningful and compelling? To find out, Jane Little talks to Nicholas Taylor, a shamanic practitioner who’s undergone a ritualistic live burial; Peter Williams, a traditional Catholic; and Isabel Clarke, a clinical psychologist.

This podcast was produced by CTVC for its Things Unseen series of podcasts. CTVC is an award-winning media company producing television, radio and new media content on social issues, current affairs, religion, ethics, history and education.  Pod Academy is grateful to them for enabling us to carry this podcast in our Faith and Non Belief Strand.

About Things Unseen

In 2013, the independent production company, CTVC, commissioned a piece of original research, The Spirit of Things Unseen, on belief in post-religious Britain.

The findings showed that over three-quarters of all adults (77%) and three fifths (61%) of non-religious people believe that “there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means.”

The research also revealed that nearly 60% of the UK population believe in some kind of spiritual being, and more than half of all adults think that spiritual forces have some influence on earth.

To engage with the growing group of people who place themselves outside formal religion, but have a sense that there is “more to life than meets the eye”, CTVC created a new regular podcast, Things Unseen.

Things Unseen aims to address the needs and interests of those who no longer feel they belong to a religious community, but retain some spiritual beliefs. At the same time, it also wants to engage with people who still identify with one of the main faiths – and provide a platform for both groups to talk to each other.

You can contact the Things Unseen team by emailing:[email protected]

Some of us love fashion.  But all that alluring glamour comes at a price. Sally Feldman talks to journalist and campaigner, Tansy Hoskins, about her book Stitched Up: The anti-captalist book of fashion.

They explore what is behind the clothes we wear - the money, the advertising that distorts women's bodies and the production in poor countries around the globe.

But would fashion be any more sustainable under a different political system? Is green fashion a realistic alternative?  And do Soviet designers like Popova and Stefanova really offer an alternative?

Designs by Lyubov Popova

 

Tansy E. Hoskins is a writer, journalist and activist. She has worked for Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Islam Channel. She writes for theGuardian and Business of Fashion, and has appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera and Channel 4's Ten O'Clock Live.

"I work in a dying industry.  Newspapers will die.

"And what happens to you when you know you're going to die?  It focuses the mind, it brings to the fore certain existential questions like, 'Who am I?'  'Why am I here?' 'What has it all been about?'

"It might even raise the questions, 'Is death the end?' ' Is there life after death?'  What am I going to leave behind me?'  And,of course, it also raises the question, 'Help! Is there any medicine that can fix me or at least keep me going for a little while longer...."

That is the view of Hugh Linehan, the Digital Development Editor of the Irish Times talking at The Huston School of Film and Digital Media in Galway, University of Ireland.

The podcast is drawn from that presentation.  In it, Hugh Linehan takes a frank and sweeping look at the challenges facing newspapers – in print and online.

We've known for a long time that big trouble was coming, he says. The twin pillars of newspaper revenues - sales and advertising - have been falling for many years.

Using the Irish Times as his case study, Hugh Linehan explores the three key issues that must be addressed if newspapers are to solve the ‘innovators dilemma’ (whereby innovation necessitates killing off the previous industry) - the business model, the technology and content creation.

This is just part of Hugh Linehan’s lecture, the second part looking at the law surrounding the digital news operation will be available shortly.

When we think of the stuff that dreams are made on, we might think of the spirits that Shakespeare’s Prospero conjures up in “The Tempest”; we might think of stars, rainbows, maybe even wishing wells, but what probably doesn’t leap to mind is a loaf of Wonder Bread. And yet, ever since the invention of the mass-manufactured loaf of white bread in the 1920s, that spongy tasteless loaf has been a way in which Americans have defined themselves and one another.

This podcast was made for the New Books Network, on their New Books on Food strand.  In it Eric LeMay talks to Aaron Bobrow-Strain, from Whitman College.

In his new book, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Beacon Press, 2012),  Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us how that familiar slice of white bread is much more than a food. It’s a symbol, one that in its nearly hundred-year-old existence has come to represent “the apex of modern progress and the specter of physical decay, the promise of a better future to come and America’s fall from small-town agrarian virtue.”

The history Bobrow-Strain tells us ranges from the immigrant bakeries of turn-of-the-century America to the Cold War to the rise of yuppie and “locavore” eating habits. It’s a history, as he writes, “of the countless social reformers, food experts, industry executives, government officials, diet gurus, and ordinary eaters who have thought that getting Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread) could save the world—or at least restore the country’s moral, physical, and social fabric.

Numbers have come to dominate our politics and our news cycle. GDP, inflation, CPI, RPI, credit ratings, FTSE, debt ratios, discount rates, the list goes on.

While politicians and commentators wield these numbers to justify their decisions and criticise their opponents, not everyone is convinced we should allow numbers to dominate our political discourse.

In this podcast, Alex Burd talks to Lorenzo Fioramonti, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Sciences and director of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation of the University of Pretoria. and author of a new book, How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics.  Note:  An Italian translation is available below this English transcript.

 

Lorenzo began by explaining his thesis.

Lorenzo Fioramonti: We have created a system of accounting, of calculation, of numerical production that is governing all the decisions we take as a society. They dictate the choices that our policy makers take, they dictate what we consider productive or not.

It’s like a meta-analysis, our economists and policy makers are not so powerful as we think in terms of what decisions we take or they are powerful and they find ways of justifying their decisions by using numbers that give an appearance of neutrality to the decisions that they take so that the society can accept them, often when they’re hard, and have a severe impact on our wellbeing; because the numbers somehow make these decisions look inevitable.

Alex Burd: They’re used to mask the motives of controversial decisions, such as in Britain the recent spending cuts?

LF: Yes, I would say that ‘austerity speak’ these days, especially in Europe, is being cloaked under the power of these numbers.

Take GDP. GDP is often used as a way of curbing popular dissent against certain pro market decisions because GDP says the only way for us to develop and grow is to support certain sectors in the business community and therefore we need to be willing to take tough decisions to reduce spending, to reduce benefits and so on. And often at the same time, while we do that, we pay for the subsidies that go into the pockets of those who produce the growth that is reflected in GDP.

So all these numbers, and I could go on and on with other examples, are used in times of austerity to justify the difficult cuts that our governments are putting forward at the moment.

AB: A lot has been made of the fact that UK chancellor, George Osborne, is a politician and many of the people around him are politicians without real world experience. George Osborne also doesn’t have any economics background. Is this a problem as numbers become more and more important?

LF: It is a problem to a certain extent. Numbers are created by experts (or technocrats, as I call them). So when politicians who have been elected by citizens to take decisions in the name of social justice and redistribution and collective wellbeing use numbers without even understanding the methodological components then we have a double problem. We have a problem because those who execute these decisions are doing it in the name of numbers that they themselves do not understand, and they become even more dangerous perpetrators, or executors, of decisions they do not themselves control.

So on the one hand the politics of numbers has given a lot of power to technocrats; some of these technocrats are operating behind the scenes. We don’t see them. Some of them are executive directors in central banks; or they are part of very powerful think tanks and so. Some of them also play political roles, but often the policy makers, those that make the ultimate decisions are influenced by numbers they themselves don’t understand.

AB: I see.

"Freedom of expression is the ultimate freedom.  It means the freedom to live, to think, to love and be loved, to be secure, to be happy...."

So said Pakistani campaigner Shahzad Ahmad accepting the Advocacy Award at this year's Freedom of Expression Awards in London last week.

Shahzad Ahmad (photo: Alex Brenner)

Index on Censorship annual awards ceremony, honours the bravery, and dogged determination of campaigners, journalists and digital activists around the world who put their passion and commitment to free speech before their own personal safety, who challenge governments, gangs, and corporate interests who threaten freedom of expression.

Our podcast gives you a brief insight into the courage of the nominees, and finishes with a great song from Egyptian hip hop artist Mayam Mahmoud (pictured) who addresses issues such as sexual harassment and women's rights in Egypt through her music.  Mayam won the Arts Award.  You'll find more information on the Awards on the Index website.

Advocacy Award nominees

Colectivo Chuhcan, a mental health pressure group from Mexico

Rommy Mom, Nigeria's leading human rights lawyer

Generation Wave Institute from Burma who promote democratic engagment in Burma

Shahzad Ahmad, cyber freedom activist from Pakistan (winner)

Journalism Award nominees

Abdulelah Haider Shaye imprisoned for reporting on drone strikes in Yemen

Callum Macrae and C4 News who documented the truth about Sri Lankan Human Rights abuses

Azadliq - one of the few remaining independent newspapers in Azerbaijan (winner)

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras  for their work on the NSA surveillance

Dina Meza and investigative journalist from Honduras

Digital Activism nominees

Edward Snowden who leaked the documents uncovering the mass surveillance by NSA and GCHQ

Free Weibo, the uncensored version of China's social network, SinaWeibo

Shubhranshu Choudhary who set up a mobile phone news service in rural India (winner)

Tails, a free open source encryption tool that protects journalists and sources in any country

Arts  Award nominees (this section was introduced by playwright Howard Brenton, who you can hear on the podcast)

David Cecil, imprisoned in Uganda for producing a 'pro-gay' play

Meltem Arikan, playwright, whose play 'Mi Minor' enraged the Turkish Government

Lucien Bourjeily, Lebanese playwright who confronted the Lebanese Censorship Bureau

Mayam Mahmoud, Egyptian hip artist and women's right campaigner (winner)

 Photo of Mayam Mahmoud by Alex Brenner

Mayam's song

Girls in our society are divided

Into those who wear the niqab, those who wear the veil

And those who are in between

There are a lot of cases that depend on the girl

How she dresses

And how she looks

But this is not the rule

How can you judge me

By my hair or by my veil?

If one day you look at me

I am not going to be the one

Hiding her/my embarrassment

You cat call and you harass

Thinking this is right not wrong

Even if these are words

This is not the kind of treatment

These are stones

It is not her clothing that is inappropriate or wrong

It’s this way of thinking which is

Sometimes the clothing is too much

But you are the one to blame

One look can be could hurt

And it is not right of you to be staring

You deserve to be slapped twice on the face

Femininity in Egypt is divided into two parts

There is a difference between what men and women consider

And both are wrong

Who said that femininity is about dresses

Femininity is about intelligence and intellect

This podcast is drawn from a lecture by celebrated Egyptian author Ahdaf Souief about the ongoing revolution in Egypt.  It was the annual lecture of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Kings College, London  and was held at the end of 2013.

The State Crime Initiative studies and records the violations of human rights by governments and other state actors – genocide, torture, brutality and also corruption, cronyism, economic exploitation and negligence.

Tear gas in Muhammed Mahmoud Street, Cairo

As Ahdaf Souief makes clear, these things often go together, and overturning a criminal state is a long term and dangerous undertaking.

Jika

She takes as her starting point the events in Mohammed Mahmoud Street, one of the streets running into Tahrir Square, which has been the site of much police and army brutality, and where many activists have been killed, including Jika   .

On the day of the lecture, there were memorial demonstrations in the street, and Ahdaf had come from there to London for the the lecture.

Ahdaf is introduced by Professor Penny Green, co-director of the International State Crime Initiative.

A video of the complete lecture by Ahdaf Souief can be found here

There is also a blog on Pod Academy, which you might like to read together with this podcast: Mubarak's Egypt: Nexus of Criminality 

You might also be interested in our podcast of the ISCI Annual lecture 2011 by Noam Chomsky, Changing contours of world order.

 

Links

Al Jazeera on shootings in Cairo in July 2013

Khaled Mohamed Saeed killed in Alexandria June 2110 - seen as the act that ;launched the revolution' the

News piece on Jika 1

News piece on Jika 2