I wanna be a protocol: online media and electronic structures of kinship

Heidegger famously identified Modernity with a technological leveling of being to a single order of a “standing reserve.” In a radically different tone, Gilles Deleuze articulated a single “plane of immanence” within which ontological distinctions between mind and body, God and world, interiority and exteriority become indiscernible. Taking such philosophical declarations as points of departure, this panel will consider how a collapse of ontological distinction emerged as a thematic and structural trope in literary and cinematic modernisms. We hope to consider how writers and film-makers of the 20th c. utilize the resources of their media to ask “the question of being” that troubled their philosophical contemporaries and heirs. In this vein, we will examine how these modernist ontologies of immanence describe the crisis of a subject saturated and eclipsed by a world which comprises her while also remaining strange or opaque. Papers will ask what is lost with the departure of a distinctly human sense of “being” and how the historical arrival of an alternative ontological order may be evident in the lived experience of modernity. In this sense, the relationship to departures and arrivals becomes the modern subject’s suspicion that he is unable to do either vis á vis the world.

Representations of multicultural identities in British Cinema

This paper explores the transnational and interstitial dimensions of cultural production in Britain today, and the representation of migrant and diasporic identities in contemporary mainstream British cinema. The box office success of films like Gurindha Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and East is East (Daniel O’Donnell 1999) and their precursors My Beautiful Launderette (Stephen Frears 1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears 1987) and the TV mini-series Buddha of Suburbia (Roger Mitchell 1993) seem to celebrate and articulate a set of values around hybridity and alterity: a discourse of multiculturalism. This paper will engage with a series of key questions. Are there ideological values implicit within and common to all these texts? Can we map a rhetoric or discourse of multiculturalism within popular culture? Do mainstream representations of immigrant identities represent a discourse of resistance, a decolonising global culture or is this Western brand of multiculturalism still located within an Orientalising gaze? In what ways are multiculturalism and postcolonialism overlapping and yet opposing rhetorics? [From the Author]

Isomorphic effects of managerial and directoral career paths

The extensive array of interlocking directorate research remains near-exclusively cross-sectional or comparative cross-sectional in nature. While this has been fruitful in identifying persistent structures of inter-organisational relationships evidence of the impact of these structures on organisational performance or activity has been more limited. This should not be surprising because, by their nature, relationships have strong longitudinal and dynamic qualities that are likely to be difficult to isolate through cross-sectional approaches. Clearly, managerial practice is inevitably strongly conditioned by the specific contingencies of the time and the information available through networks of colleagues and advisers (particularly at board level) at the time. But managerial and directoral capabilities and mental sets are also developed over time, particularly through previous experiences in these roles and the formation of long-lasting 'strong' and 'weak' relationships. This paper tests the influence of three longitudinal dimensions of managers and directors' relationships on a set of indicators of financial performance, drawing from a large dataset of detailing historic board membership of UK firms. It finds evidence of isomorphic processes through these channels and establishes that the longitudinal design considerably enhances the detection of performance effects from directorate interlocks. More broadly, the research has implications for the conception of collective action and the constitution of 'community'.