Recap of Craft Economies: Inequalities, Opportunities, Interventions conference

This post was originally written for the BCMCR (Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research) blog. On 4th December I ran the Craft Economies: Inequalities, Opportunities, Interventions conference, as part of my AHRC Innovation Fellowship project Craft Expertise. The aim of the conference, which took place at STEAMhouse Birmingham, was to highlight and discuss issues around

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

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

Conferences at Middlesex and Salford

I’ve been on ‘tour’ in the past week presenting at conferences at the University of Middlesex and the University of Salford. Before doing a quick recap of those, first I’ll introduce what I presented myself. Compared to my previous conference presentations, this is a more rounded analysis of my pilot study because it includes material from the

Artists, expertise and mediation

The work of Bourdieu is useful for thinking about expertise in the art world as a social relation, and this has parallels with other definitions of expertise in other fields that I have used before (Arnoldi, 2007 and Prince, 2010 are examples). Another parallel I found across the literature is the tension between ‘publicness’ and legitimacy; and with social media allowing people to perform expertise in a public way, is this a tension for artists? Finally, I find Bourdieu’s ideas of field useful for conceptualising cultural production, but I argue that within the ensemble of agents and institutions he talks about, the mediating potential of social media platforms, and the corporations behind them, also need to be considered.

University of Birmingham Research Poster Conference

On 16 June I presented at the University of Birmingham’s research poster conference. My poster covered the performing expertise aspect of my PhD, and I designed it to look like Twitter to make it a bit more eye-catching. It was a productive day and definitely good practice for talking about my research to a variety

Cultures in Disarray, Kings College London 11-12 June 2015

This was originally posted on the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research blog. Last week I presented externally for the first time at the Cultures in Disarray conference at Kings College London. It was a thoroughly enjoyable two days with many interesting talks from a variety of disciplines. The first keynote speech was by

Melissa Gregg at the University of Leicester

This was originally posted on the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research blog. On 12 May 2015 I attended a research seminar at the University of Leicester with Melissa Gregg, whose work has been particularly useful for my own research on social media, especially the book Works Intimacy (2011), about mobile technology, the internet and how it impacts the