Our biggest and best assessment performance

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a periodic expert-led research assessment exercise that takes place every seven years. In the recent REF2021 results Coventry University was placed 58 out of 129 institutions in the Times Higher Education (THE) power ranking, up from 80 in 2014. Institutions are invited to submit to 34 units of assessment (UoA). CPC’s research was submitted under Unit of Assessment 32: Art and Design: History, Theory and Practice. 86 institutions were submitted to UoA32 and we have been ranked by THE as follows:

-15^th for research power. 82% of our research was classed as four-star (world-leading) or three-star (internationally excellent) in its originality, significance or rigour.

-8^th for research impact. Three of our four case studies were classed as world leading (4*), and the fourth as internationally excellent (3*) in terms of how our research has impacted society.

-100% of our research environment was regarded as world leading or internationally excellent in terms of vitality, sustainability, and how it enables our research.

Teaching and Learning in the Postdigital World

On the 21st of April, Professor Gary Hall gave a keynote talk at the Teaching and Learning in the Postdigital World event at Coventry University organised by Professor Sylvester Arnab and Dr Daniel Villar-Onrubia. The event focused on on the abilities (i.e. competences, skills, capabilities) that all university students need to develop in order to be able to engage effectively and ethically with the current social and technical ecosystem, and to make the most of it in the context of teaching, learning and development, professional activities, civic participation and everyday life. Likewise, it addressed the question of how universities can support them in doing so.

The programme consisted of multiplier events of the E-DigiLit and the EscapeRacism Erasmus+ projects.

BiblioTech Symposium: Library as Institution

On the 5th of May, Professor Gary Hall and Professor Mel Jordan gave an invited talk entitled "Art and Knowldege" as part of Liverpool's BiblioTech Symposium in the session Library as Institution. The event was organised by Exhibition Research Lab and also featured Joana Chicau, Johanna Drucker, Esther Leslie, Edgar Schmitz, and Emily Segal.The exhibition included installations by Erica Scourti, Anna Barham, Silvio Lorruso and Diagonal Press.

London Book Fair: Open Access Book Infrastructures

On the 7th of April, Dr Janneke Adema gave a talk alongside Dr Joe Deville entitled "The Case for Open Access book infrastructures" at the London Book Fair as part of the panel Open Books under the Microscope organised by the Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum (RSPF).

Students filled the walls of the ICC building with artwork, films, and practice presentations and had two amazing panels with external speakers linking PGR research with community organisations, artists, and other academics. Once again, thank you to all who came out to support and made the first cross-centre student conference such a resounding success! 

#CreativeCultures2022 

CONVERGENCE. Creative Cultures PGR Conference 2022

Two days of stimulating conversations, great workshops and performances showcasing the amazing talent and infectious energy of our PhD students! The event included several workshops and was very well attended. 

Thank you to everyone who attended the Convergence: Creative Cultures 2022 conference and made it such a success. We had a packed two days with PGR speakers, workshops, and performances from across the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Centre for Dance Research, and Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities. 

UNBIND: Reimagining the academic monograph                         

For Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), a programme of talks ranging from digital art history and bias in AI, to transformative practices in digital investigations.

- Dr Janneke Adema - Keynote Lecture 'Post-Publishing: Experimenting with Living Books'

- Rebekka Kiesewetter - Re-Reading & the Politics of Excess and/as Accessibility, part of the Radical piracy and open access roundtable (with Dr Julia Rone and Dr Samuel Moore).

Postfeminism and Body Image

By Sarah Riley, Adrienne Evans and Martine Robson for Routledge, 2022.

Postfeminism and Body Image is a groundbreaking work that provides a poststructuralist and psychosocial analysis of key issues at the intersections of body image, psychology and media. The book outlines the theoretical framework through the work of renowned philosophers, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and their use in feminist scholarship, to address body-image issues and challenges in the context of a postfeminist sensibility. 

'The Role of Graduate Attributes in Higher Education. A Review of the Issues Associated with Graduate Attributes and the Case for their Measurement'

By Dominic Mahon for Interchange. A Quarterly Review of Education. 

This literature review considers the role graduate attributes have to play in contemporary higher education (HE). Considering academic literature and reports from government and industry, it argues that there is currently a crisis in HE whereby the financial benefits of having a degree are overwhelmed by the financial burden of obtaining one. This crisis has its roots in the growing trend to perceive the value of HE as the means to the end of employment rather than as an end in itself.

Photo:  Panda Mery, 'Weapons of mass creation', 2020.

'Defund Culture'

By Gary Hall for Radical Philosophy.

The spread of the Omicron variant this winter was met with renewed calls for the UK Government to fund the arts and culture through the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic and beyond. ‘We are in crisis mode’, Nicolas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. ‘We need to see short-term finance, we need to see loans, we need to see VAT looked at again, we need to see business rates looked at again’. Meanwhile, both the BBC and The Guardian have been running major series, titled Rethink and Reconstruction After Covid respectively, to explore how society should change in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. 

In the first part of 'Defund Culture,' Hall casts a fresh eye on how the ‘culture wars’ can help to explain the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the current Conservative administration when it comes to supporting the arts. In the second part he then argues that, if we really want to rethink the future of society post-pandemic with a view to building back better with a new antiracist, anticlassist, anti-heteropatriarchal normal, rather than defending existing models of state funding of the arts, the way in which we should respond to the latest crisis in the creative industries is actually by defunding culture and many of its major institutions.   

'What if Academic Publishing worked like Fan Publishing? Imagining the Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own'

By Sarah Kate Merry et al. in Transformative Works and Cultures.

Researchers, universities, and academic libraries develop a range of tools and platforms to make scholarship more accessible. What could these scholarly communications and open access projects learn from examples set by fandom and fan activists, for example the fan works platform Archive of Our Own (AO3)? This conceptual paper, the result of a brainstorming session by scholars and librarians, proposes that a Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own should excel at making scholarly knowledge production into a collective endeavor that recognizes many kinds of contributions.

'When the Script Hits the Fan: Why Archers fans stop listening (and why they can’t completely keep away)'

By Sarah Kate Merry in Courage, C., & Headlam, N. (Eds.), Fandom Culture and The Archers: An Everyday Story of Academic Folk, Emerald Publishing. 

The first academic study of the phenomenon of The Archers fandom from the fans themselves. The fourth instalment in the Academic Archers collection, Fandom Culture and The Archers looks beyond the popular success of the Archers to explore how the programme, and the themes it discusses, are used in teaching, learning, research and professional settings, and how the Academic Archers fandom helps shape these real life impacts.

Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing (2022 update)

By Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Marcell Mars, and Tobias Steiner for the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project.

Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing is a three-part research and scoping report created to support the Experimental Publishing and Reuse Work Package (WP 6) of the COPIM project. It also serves as a resource for the scholarly community, especially for authors and publishers interested in pursuing more experimental forms of book publishing. This is the second version of this report (you can find the first version here), which includes feedback from our community and updates, as well as new additions, predominantly to sections 2 (typology) and 3 (workflow and tools). 

Towards Better Practices for the Community Governance of Open Infrastructures

By Patrick Hart, Janneke Adema, and Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM).

This report has been created as a research output to support the COPIM project: an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. Funded by the Research England Development (RED) Fund and Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – COPIM is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access (OA) book publishing to flourish.

Translated by  Román Suárez and Laureano Ralón (Spanish)

We have entered a new era of nature. What is left of the frontiers of modern thought that separated the living from the inert, the subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, the value from facts, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions which presided over the modern invention of nature be preserved? In Nature as an Event, Didier Debaise argues that new narratives and cosmologies are needed to re-articulate what has hitherto remained separate. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic way of approaching nature.

Subscribe here! 

The first text discussed was Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era with the editors, Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito, joining the discussion. 

The programme for the OHP reading group currently includes: 

>>>Claire Colebrook discussing Death of the PostHuman;                               >>>Daniel Ross discussing The Neganthropocene;                          >>>Nathan Jones discussing Glitch Poetics;                                              >>>Noah Roderick discussing The Being of Analogy.  

Peter Willis reviews The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements by Kimberley Kinder for Social and Cultural Geography.

"Kimberley Kinder’s The Radical Bookstore uses the concept of counterspaces in order to explore ‘why and how activists construct space for contentious politics’. Kinder’s research spans 77 print-based spaces across the spectrum of the ‘radical’, from volunteer-run squatted infoshops to NGOs who own their buildings and employ a full-time staff. Though limited to the United States, Kinder’s range allows the comparison of these diverse practices..."

The entire review is available here.