Dying Awareness Week

It's Dying Awareness Week this week and as in previous years we have a Before I Die Festival which is being held this Saturday (23 May) in central York at the Quaker Meeting House on Friargate.   

Dying Awareness Week is part of a new social movement to reflect on how we manage death and dying.  It provides the space and opportunities to talk about end of life issues.  Our Festival is part of a network of events organised across the UK.    Watch our our new short film here:

http://cdoc.org.uk/public-dialogue/

This year events run from 10.30 until 4pm and include a workshop on Advance Decisions (Living Wills)  - Your Choices at the End of Life  (2-4pm).  The programme is available using this link.

Museums, Migration and Identity

A chapter co-authored by Gonul Bozoglu (2nd-year PhD) features in a new book called 'Museums Migration and Identity in Europe' (Ashgate 2015).

The chapter is entitled 'Constitutive others and the management of difference: museum representations of Turkish identities' and is co-researched and co-authored with one of the book editors, Prof Chris Whitehead from Newcastle University. It looks at museum displays in Turkey and Western Europe - particularly the Netherlands and Germany where there are large Turkish populations in relation to issues of identity, migration and alterity. 

With ever-increasing attention to migration both in political and cultural spheres, the book is a landmark contribution to a critical field of study and practice.

 

The imperatives surrounding museum representations of place have shifted from the late eighteenth century to today. The political significance of place itself has changed and continues to change at all scales, from local, civic, regional to national and supranational. At the same time, changes in population flows, migration patterns and demographic movement now underscore both cultural and political practice, be it in the accommodation of ‘diversity’ in cultural and social policy, scholarly explorations of hybridity or in state immigration controls. 



The book investigates the historical and contemporary relationships between museums, places and identities. It brings together contributions from international scholars, academics, practitioners from museums and public institutions, policymakers, and representatives of associations and migrant communities to explore all these issues.

Click here for more details about the book. 

If you are interested in buying the book with a 50% discount then drop Gonul a line on gb784@york.ac.uk to get a discount code

York Sociology Dept in World Top 100 Departments

The QS World University Rankings by Subject for 2015 has placed a number of University of York departments in the top 50 and top 100.

 The Sociology department is officially in the top 100 departments in the world.

European Society of Criminology and Crime without Criminality

Alex Simpson is going to be presenting at the European Society of Criminology annual conference in September 2015.


He is going to present a paper on how deviance is constructed by drawing on the financial life in the City of London. Alex is using his doctoral research which is an ethnographic study of London's financial heartland.

Three new short pieces from Dave Beer: Smartness, football and metrics

The real game gets filtered by the imaginary. OlegDoroshin / Shutterstock.com

This week Dave Beer has published three short open access pieces in various places.

1. The first, piece, Living with smartness, was published by the digital commons site Open Democracy
2. The second piece, Systems of measurement have a productive power in our lives, reflects on his recent work on metrics and was published by LSE Politics & Policy.
3. The final piece, Real or fantasy, football is now consumed by numbers, looks at the changing consumption of football and was published by The Conversation.

The Krays, the BBC's Hairy Bikers and Corpses

Ruth Penfold-Mounce has been interviewed by the University Research Online Site about her recent filming experiences with the BBC's Hairy Bikers, her research into celebrity culture and crime and also death, dying and corpses.

The resulting story has just been published: Celebrating Crime: How the rise of the TV corpse feeds our appetite for fictional violence

Researching Graphic Content from Conflict Zones

Holly Steel is presenting a paper at the International Visual Methods Conference in Brighton in Sept 2015. She will be sharing work drawn from her thesis by exploring 'Violence on a Loop: The ethics of researching graphic content from conflict zones'

Holly draws on her experience researching YouTube videos arising from the August 21st chemical attack in Syria, to explore the issues faced by researchers conducting visual analyses of graphic user-generated content (UGC). These glimpses of the conflict are often graphic, and include bodies in pain, those who are dying and those who are dead. Exposure to such content is increasingly part of journalistic labour. The issues faced by journalists in managing exposure to graphic content are echoed in the work of the researcher, who not only has to manage their own exposure to graphic content but navigate the ways in which these pieces of content are ethically presented within academic work. 

She suggests that issues faced by researchers, are:

1) ethical duty towards those within the frame; 

2) the ethics of reproduction;

3) vicarious trauma.