Academic Publishing Roundtable

Julia Brockley (Intellect Press) and Natalie Foster (Routledge)

Senior editorial staff from renowned publishers Intellect (Julia Brockley) and Routledge (Natalie Foster) will host a publishing roundtable designed to help scholars and postgraduates to navigate the world of scholarly publishing. Drawing from their expertise across journals and books, the publishers will respond to questions from participants and provide insider perspectives on the publishing process. This will be an open discussion offering both early career scholars and more senior academics a chance to discuss industry trends, including, but not limited to: AI tech, open access, micropublications, growth in journal submissions, data-driven decision making, community engagement, accessibility, and UN SDGs.

National Identity, Memory and Trust: Mediating Heritage during the Culture Wars.

Simon Dawes

Although nationality as a ‘structure of feeling” (Williams, 1961) is strongly “felt” and experienced at times of “extraordinary atmosphere”, it is also felt and experienced affectively in more routine ways (Closs Stephens, 2022: 15) because culture is “ingrained in unreflexive patterns of social life [and] stitched into the experience and the assumptions of the everyday” (Edensor, 2002: 10). While explanations of how the nation is constituted through traditions or a common experience of time and place tell part of the story, therefore, they also need to include an affective account of how place, gestures and practices are felt and experienced (Closs Stephens, 2022: 18).

In recent years, the UK’s National Trust has sought to “tell inclusive, honest histories” about Britain’s cultural heritage, addressing and reinterpreting the “hidden history” of the buildings and collections in its care, identifying in particular their links to colonialism and the slave trade. This progressive and critical mediation of cultural heritage is taking place within a context of ostensibly decolonial initiatives that move away from the unconscious construction of “white spaces”, as well as a shift in national cultural policy towards an emphasis on “creative diversity and heritage” (Moss, 2005; Saha, 2018). Such initiatives however had led to a reactionary backlash against supposedly “woke ideology” “rewriting history” with “intrusive interpretations” that “demonize people’s history or heritage” and that create an atmosphere in which some members are made to feel “unwelcome”, involving even an opaquely-funded campaign to take over the management of the Trust and restore its “original apolitical ethos”. This paper will consider the arguments made about the inclusiveness of the mediated atmosphere of both traditional “white”/“apolitical” spaces and “woke”/“reinterpreted” spaces and the extent to which it is possible to intervene in such mediations without being “ideological”.

Creating atmosphere – weather, landscape and mood in detective drama on British television.

Christine Geraghty

‘Atmosphere’ is a word with a whole range of meanings and connotations. Scientifically, we live in a gaseous atmosphere in which weather sweeps across us in fronts and depressions. This links into the more metaphorical association of ‘atmosphere’ with mood and tone, the tone conveyed in a created media work and the mood engendering feelings to be experienced by the audience.

The success of long-lasting series is often linked to its success in handling extended narrative action and the creation of long-lasting characters. But, as important, is the creation of an atmosphere associated with the series, an atmosphere which provides both an instant association for the intended audience and an immersive experience in a particular space which lasts over a protracted period of time. In this presentation, I intended to look at how ‘atmosphere’ is created in a number of British detective series: Midsomer Murders (1997-present), Shetland (2013-present) and Slow Horses (2022-present). I will examine how the sensorial feeling of a particular atmosphere is created through the use of space and setting, weather and land/streetscape, as well as camera work, lighting and mise-en-scène. I will consider how this creation of an atmosphere works with or against competing pressures on production such as diversity policies, international sales and tourism. In addition, I will consider how each one has a particular place in creating a sense of the UK as place and the British as a nation.

On not fitting in. The daily uncanny in everyday media representations.

Joke Hermes and Kim Spierenburg

Using audience and artistic research as well as auto-ethnographic dialogue, Hermes and Spierenburg interrogate the everyday uncanny of media atmospheres in their seemingly careless presentation of perfect bodies, e.g., in popular drama, advertising or sports reportage. Slender and sexy bodies clearly require high maintenance and exclude the ordinariness of the well-rounded or the wheelchair-user body. What affect is produced in the insincere invitation extended by everyday media representation? Why does being excluded make us feel uneasy? How does exclusion so strongly suggest that media atmosphere tends towards the dark? Threats, it seems, are everywhere, happiness is at best temporary and usually unmasked as illusion. How to come to a form of media critique that promotes dialogue and inclusion and that recognizes the right to feel one belongs?

Audiences and Eco Media Footprints.

Annette Hill

Scientists and engineers have established and debated the intensive and harmful impact of high energy use for streaming media on the environment (e.g. Marks et al 2021, Lopez et al 2024). This research explores what audiences can do in making visible eco media footprints. Eco media footprinting is a type of research that recognises the relations between digital media infrastructures, devices and design, audience engagement and experiences and environmental sustainability (Walker 2024, Starosielski, Vaughan, Pasek & Silcox, 2024). By asking audiences to visualize and reflect in a mapping exercise on the impact of streaming on the climate and their environment, audiences make visible and knowable the carbon footprints of high energy applications such as streaming media, AI and other data intensive platforms.

This talk applies methods (e.g. interviews and maps) and concepts (e.g. affect and imaginaries) in audience studies which enable a nuanced understanding of practices for the material and symbolic places of eco media footprints. Rather than repeat the over familiar words and images of media atmospheres such as the cloud, streaming, or green energy, as promoted by Big Tech and related infrastructures, an audience perspective offers a fresh understanding of the clean and dirty atmospheres surrounding our eco media footprints.

The Felt Experience of Atmosphere: Implications for Audience Research.

Peter Lunt

In this paper, I explore audience experiences of media atmospheres, drawing on the work of Gernot Böhme on architecture as felt spaces and Schmitz’s phenomenology. The paper introduces Böhme’s and Schmitz’s work, which analyses architectural spaces as creating atmospheres through the combination of spatial characteristics and the experience of immersion by participants. Adoptions of Böhme’s work in the study of the role of production and the experience of playing video games and film are reviewed, followed by an interpretation of the experiential aspects of media events, liveness and participation in audience discussions. The paper considers the broader implications of an atmospheric approach to analysing audience experience.

Repulsive Media.

Dylan Mulvin

How can we understand our lived environment - our atmosphere, our vibe - through the deployment of repulsive media? Repulsion offers a rich, if neglected, framework for understanding the organised shaping and distribution of bodies. Repulsion implies an extreme experience of disgust or revulsion so intense as to be not just put off but driven away. Repulsion is an odd phenomenon, pointing toward both a bodily — affective response and a physical effect; it’s a gut-turning reaction and the push of things being driven apart. This presentation considers the use of “repulsive light” to condition behaviour in everyday environments and the use of mobile devices. Repulsive light is considered here alongside other forms of hostile infrastructure and architecture — the use of sounds only audible to “unwanted” populations, the use of bars and spikes to make surfaces unsleepable — and alongside the exponential growth in tools and technologies for so-called “digital wellbeing.” The latter includes the lighting of our digital screens, the use of night modes , and even the use of monochrome settings meant to make screens less appealing.

Repulsion is a kindred affect with disgust and horror – sense experiences at the centre of much film and television work – and both its pursuit and avoidance may in fact be sources of pleasure. We may also understand repulsion through what Sara Ahmed describes as the passion of negative attachment. Accordingly, this presentation asks whether a bodily, affective, and infrastructural analysis is made legible by following repulsion and tracing back from where we are to where we were pushed from.

Atmospheric (Re)Constitutions of Cult Film Experiences

Hario Priambodho, Lund University, Sweden

Cult film events like The Bad Film Festival offer a unique atmosphere to audiences. In two Swedish cities of Malmö and Göteberg exhibitors run regular festivals and stand alone screenings of cult films like The Room, Birdemic and Miami Connection where audiences congregate together to watch a particular cult movie in a particular cinema in order to generate a particular cult film experience.

This presentation explores how the cult film experience is sustained by a shared reading of the same film, a shared affective engagement, and a shared set of rituals that generates a collective cult effervescence. Collective effervescence occurring within the cult screenings contribute to an ephemeral atmosphere. Gernot Böhme’s ideas of atmosphere can be seen as an antecedent of how individuals place themselves and feel within an experience. Through a close examination of how audiences perceive the intertwining relationship of the media text at hand, other audience members, and the material environment, the presentation uses empirical qualitative research to analyse how audiences constitute cult effervescence. Interviews and participant observations of bad film festivals and screenings in two cities also highlights the role of exhibitors as facilitators of atmospheres for live screenings of bad cult films. Therefore, this presentation will put forward the idea that atmosphere, as both generated and experienced at the same time, plays a crucial role in the constitution and ultimately reconstitution of the cult film experience.