Feeling the commute: Affect, affordance and communities in motion

This chapter draws upon research conducted in 2012-2013 in the English town of Glossop, Derbyshire, UK, exploring notions of affect, affordance and interconnections as part of a project within the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Connected Communities programme: Revisiting the mid-point of British Communities: a study of affect, affordance and connectivity in Glossop. The project aimed to explore how an affectual analysis of place, space and mobility reveal a deeper understanding of how non-familial residents of Glossop connect/ disconnect with each other. This chapter will specifically focus on experiences of Glossop train station, illustrating research data gathered during the train commute from Glossop to Manchester, as well as the affordances of the train station itself. Highlighting contemporary residential migration patterns, practices of commuting and everyday mobilities, this focus asks how people’s senses and feelings of community are constituted in relation to these mobilities and the affordances of particular spaces. The findings of this chapter further reveal that amalgamating a study of affect and atmospheres within social and cultural contexts can impact on the design of mobility, transport and spaces which are designed to facilitate community (dis)connection.

The BBC's role in the changing production ecology of pre-school television in Britain

This paper examines the changing production ecology of British pre-school television in light of developments since the mid-1990s and the specific role played by the BBC. Underpinning the research is the perception that pre-school television is characterised by a complex set of industry relationships and dependencies that demands content which needs to satisfy a wide range of international circumstances and commercial prerogatives. For the BBC this has created tension between its public service goals and commercial priorities. Pre-school programming began in Britain in 1950, but it was not until the mid-1990s that Britain emerged as a leading producer of pre-school programming worldwide with government/industry reports regularly identifying the children’s production sector as an important contributor to exports. The rise of pre-school niche channels (CBeebies, Nick Junior, Playhouse Disney), audience fragmentation and the internationalisation and commercialisation of markets have radically altered the funding base of children’s television and the relationships that the BBC enjoys with key players. The international success of much of its pre-school programming is based on the relationships it enjoys with independent producers who generate significant revenues from programme-related consumer products. This paper focuses on the complex and changing relationships between the BBC, independent producers, and financiers, that constitute the production ecology of pre-school television and shape its output. Within the broader setting of cultural production and global trends the paper investigates the following questions: 1) In the light of changes to the sector since the mid-1990s, what makes pre-school television significant both generally and as an ideal public service project? 2) What is the nature of the current funding crisis in British children’s television and what implications does this crisis have for the BBC’s involvement in pre-school television? 3) How is the Corporation reacting to and managing the wider commercial, cultural, regulatory and technological forces that are likely to affect its strategies for the commissioning, production and acquisition of pre-school content?

Film as an archive for colonial photographs: activating the past in the present

This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be reconstructed to produce new critical histories. The research argues for the potential of the moving image as a tool for re-staging colonial archives, as a means of generating responsible ways of looking at, and of engaging with our troubled collective pasts. In my practice I mix the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company(which became BP) with my family’s photographs from Iran, and with the documentation and narrativization of my encounter with both of these sets of materials, within the moving image. Through this process I address questions about the nature of the photographic archive and the search for historical meaning within it; the question of the researcher’s position within the archive and within the history she produces; and I investigate the affective power of colonial photographs within film and the experience of untimeliness which they produce. While addressing problems associated with the failure of photographic archives to offer access to any stable, transparent meaning, I show how engaging with slippages of meaning can produce other kinds of historical knowledge. But I also argue that attending to the impression of the ‘real’ produced by the colonial photograph as it appears within film, makes the past felt in the present tense, in ways that draw attention to the responsibility of being an onlooker in a situation of injustice. In addition I show how registering the place and time of the researcher within the new filmic archive in motion produces an effective means of imaginative time travel and a lively experience of history.