Craft, Expertise and Value

Now that my UKRI/RCUK Innovation Fellowship, Craft Expertise (short name) is off the ground and the first round of interviews and ethnography have been completed, I’m able to share some initial thoughts. First a quick recap – this project is in collaboration with Crafts Council UK and aims to support greater diversity in the UK

Post-PhD

It has been a while since I have posted on this blog and that is because I was busy finishing my PhD thesis and preparing for the viva. That is all done and minor corrections have been submitted, so now I am waiting for that official letter! Just before Christmas I was delighted to have

‘Fads’ and expertise

I’m coming to the end of a first full draft of my PhD, and in the introduction I attempted to situate my work within the wider context, my work being about expertise, and the wider context being debates around ‘post-truth’ and the denigration of experts. I mention it briefly in my introduction but if I

The Politics of Expertise in Media and Cultural Research, 30 November

This week I hosted my first symposium and it was a very stimulating day that has provided a lot of food for thought. I would like to thank the fourteen speakers who travelled from all over Europe to present at the symposium. Also a special mention to MA student Anna Pirvola, PhD student Emily Bettison, and

Registration open: the politics of expertise in media and cultural research

Free registration is now open for the symposium The politics of expertise in media and cultural research taking place at Birmingham City University on November 30 2016. Register here. Due to the unprecedented number and quality of submissions the symposium will now begin at 1pm and end at 6pm. All interested in expertise are welcome!

Work/Play conference, 6 July 2016

This was originally posted at BCMCR.org, co-written with Dr Annette Naudin. On Wednesday 6 July we attended the ‘Work/Play’ conference at Futureworks in Manchester, where we presented our joint paper Entangled Expertise: women’s use of social media in entrepreneurial work, which is currently in the process of publication. Our presentation was part of an interesting

CFP: The Politics of Expertise in Media and Cultural Research

I’m running an informal symposium on expertise as part of the research seminar programme at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, taking place on Wednesday 30 November 2016. Submissions are welcome from researchers and PhD students in all areas of media, cultural and arts research. I feel this is particularly timely given the anti-expert rhetoric during

Female artists and performing expertise

So far this year I’ve been carrying out interviews, analysing social media posts and now I’m trying to fashion what a discussion chapter might look like. The first area I have been concentrating on is one I initially knew the least about, which is gender. I started thinking out loud about this on a previous post

The Most Famous Artist

Thanks to my colleague Annette Naudin for tweeting this video, which raises a lot of questions for me about art, expertise and social media. This is a short documentary-style video by Buzzfeed which focuses on an artist on Instagram called ‘The Most Famous Artist’, whose real name is Matty. Buzzfeed follow him going to flea markets to

Gender and expertise

Lately I have noticed a particular theme in my social media analysis of artists, most notably among my female participants. A lot of my thinking around this also coincides with a paper I recently co-wrote with my colleague Annette Naudin on female cultural entrepreneurs. Before that I hadn’t read much around gender even though it is