IIPC Debate #80
Visiting Professor Bruce Johnson (University of Glasgow & University of Turku)
IIPC ten years on; where from, where to?
Wed 6 April, 2–4 pm, Janus Hall (Kaivokatu 12, Turku)
IIPC is now ten years old, and this IIPC Debate is a look back and ahead. Professor Johnson gave the very first IIPC Debate in 2010.
Bruce Johnson was formerly Professor, School of English, University of New South Wales (UNSW), during which period he also held numerous visiting lectureships and professorships including at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Edinburgh’s Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Liverpool’s Institute for Popular Music, and Turku’s Department of Cultural History where he is an Honorary Docent in popular culture and Visiting Professor, having left UNSW in 2005 to take up a range of appointments elsewhere. In addition to the Turku affiliation, he is Adjunct Professor in Communications, University of Technology Sydney and Visiting Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow. Apart from Australia, he has conducted cultural fieldwork in Scandinavia and Russia. He is co-founder of the International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC), based in the University of Turku, Finland. His teaching and research have ranged historically from the Renaissance to (post)modernity. He also serves on editorial advisory boards of Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, Perfect Beat, Jazz Research Journal and Australian Music Research
His list of academic publications runs to around 400 items, including books and book chapters, journal articles and encyclopaedia entries. A major research theme is the role of sound in the confrontations which generated modernity, and in new theories of cognition. Recent books include a study of popular music and violence (with Martin Cloonan), a collection on sound and sexuality in cinema, and with others currently in print including an edited collection on the historical relationship between jazz and totalitarianism.
IIPC Debate #81
Associate Professor JV Fuqua (Queens College/City University of New York) & Assistant Professor Elizabeth Whitney (City University of New York)
Creative Research Methods: New Modes for Engaged Practice
Mon April 11, 2–4 pm, Janus Hall (Kaivokatu 12, Turku)
Dr. JV Fuqua and Dr. Elizabeth Whitney present research that uses mediated and creative forms that challenge conventional research methods. Dr. Whitney is a performance studies scholar-practitioner who employs a participant observer ethnographic methodology. She will present her collaborative research with Finnish artists on the topic of freedom of expression and arts funding. Dr. Fuqua is a media theorist and historian by training. Their current research combines theory with practice through media capture and curation. Focusing on multiple sites of environmental and industrial disaster and displacement, Fuqua visits “non-places” and records, through sound and image, the vibrant remnants of human and nonhuman forces. This presentation will offer challenges to traditional textual analysis and interpretive modes of scholarship.
JV Fuqua is an associate professor of Media History and Theory in the Department of Media Studies at Queens College/City University of New York. They are currently on research sabbatical leave as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Turku. Dr. Fuqua’s monograph, Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and at Home, was published by Duke University Press, 2012. From Dead Horse Bay to Detroit: Disaster, Proximity, and Place in the Twenty-First Century, features a monograph and multimodal compendium that documents place, post-industrial toxicity, and environmental precarity through new feminist materialist theory, queer theory, and environmental cultural studies. http://www.jvfuqua.com.
Elizabeth Whitney is a 2015–2016 Fulbright Scholar at University of Turku in the Department of Media Studies. Her research is a collaborative, multimedia project on the subject of arts funding and freedom of expression in Finland. A performance studies scholar-practitioner, she is an assistant professor in the City University of New York at Borough of Manhattan Community College in the Department of Speech, Communication & Theatre Arts. She is currently working on a book project, Lecture as Performance: Theatricalizing Information, exploring the enduring popularity of public lecture from 19th Century U.S. platform circuits to contemporary, mediated forms. http://www.elizabethjwhitney.com.
IIPC Debate #83
Dr Graham Roberts (Nanterre University)
From Superman to the Invisible Man: Masculinity in Advertising in Putin’s Russia
Fri April 29, 3-5pm, Janus Hall (Kaivokatu 12, Turku)
Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has made hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity a central pillar, both of his own personal popularity and of Russian national identity. This is reflected in a number of areas of contemporary Russian popular culture, including advertising. In a whole series of advertisements aimed at men, the hegemonic masculinity on display offers the male consuming subject the image of himself as super hero. In these ads, marketing managers exploit specific Soviet myths of masculinity in order to reassure Russian men that ‘masculine’ power and status can be achieved just as much via consumption as through production. We propose to illustrate this, via a study of advertisements in a range of different product categories. We close with an analysis of the 2012 election ads for Putin himself, in which he is portrayed as both the sublime subject of ideology (to misquote Žižek), and the ultimate object of desire.
Graham Roberts teaches Russian language and culture at Nanterre University, just outside Paris. The author of a PhD on Soviet avant-garde literature, he is currently Vice-President of the British-French Association for the Study of Russian Culture. He has recently published a monograph on consumer culture in post-soviet Russia.
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