PhD Scholarships for 2011 Entry

PIR Strategic Priorities for 2011 PhD Studentships

 

The College will soon be deciding its allocation and deadline for research studentships, including internal College awards and those allocated to RHUL from its successful collaborative application for ESRC Doctoral Training Centre status. The Department of Politics and International Relations has now established its strategic priorities for these upcoming studentships. Potential applicants who fit these broad priorities should contact the Director of Graduate Study, Dr Alister Miskimmon, to discuss further. Strong applicants with proposals from other areas of the disciplines of politics and international relations are also encouraged to apply, and if they are very strong, the Department will also consider them for nomination for one of the studentships.

The New Political Communication Unit's strategic priorities are as follows: political mobilization and campaigning; media and security challenges; and the role of the hybrid media system—the interactions between old, new, and renewed media—in political life.

It is likely that the College will call on departments to provide nominees for studentships sometime in March, so applicants who are interested in being considered for studentships should act quickly.

PIR has had great success in securing studentships in previous years, and the Department's track record in producing excellent PhD students is demonstrated in the success of our graduates in the current competitive job market. In the past 12 months graduates have gone on to the following: Secretariat General, European Commission; Lecturer in Japanese Studies, Edinburgh; Lecturer in Media and Communications, the LSE; Lecturer in European Studies, King’s College London; MacArthur Foundation Post-Doctoral Scholarship, University of Sydney; Post-Doctoral Scholarship Vrije University Brussels; Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Edinburgh.

How Political Negotiations can be Un-mediated but Mediatized

When delicate political negotiations are needed, perhaps journalists need to get out of the way. Gadi Wolfsfeld’s studies of peace processes have shown how journalistic discretion in Northern Ireland created space for political leaders to make individual compromises. Such compromises would probably each have been unacceptable to their constituencies if lit up by a media spotlight, but only became public once the full package of a peace treaty was reached (Bono had to wait). Past negotiations between Israeli leaders with their Jordanian or Palestinian counterparts have been less successful in part because journalists in the region have tended more towards the sensationalist and the partisan.

At the LSE tonight, Nick Anstead presented an analysis of media coverage of the 2010 UK General Elections, particularly the period between 7 May and 12 May when the three major parties were involved in behind-the-scenes negotiations to form a government following inconclusive results. This was another instance in which journalists were denied access. Nevertheless, this occurred in a mediatized political environment, i.e. one in which media logics determine how processes work more than political logics. Following a political logic - principally, how the UK constitutional system works - if no party failed to produce a governing majority, then no party ‘won’, and a range of outcomes became possible. However, the prevailing media logic in the UK media ecology was that any election needs a winner. Further, in an ecology in which politics has been presidentialised, the winner has to be an individual: in this case David Cameron must be Prime Minister. That the office holder, Gordon Brown, was constitutionally entitled to remain in office until a governing coalition could be formed escaped many journalists. That the Labour Party could possibly be part of a new coalition government was almost as tricky to grasp, for hadn’t Labour’s man lost? Anstead illustrated these media meltdowns with some amusingly flustered questions from reporters of various TV channels.

Conceptually, this process was un-mediated but very mediatized. It was un-mediated because media could not provide a channel between the negotiations and the public, since reporters were barred from the political negotiations. But the event as a whole was mediatized, Anstead argues, because the range of potential outcomes was constrained by what the media system could find intelligible. As discussant, I was granted the chance to add a further point: it was surprising that UK political reporters were caught off guard to such an extent given the close nature of the polls. Surely they should have provided a guide to how the constitution works and mapped the various permutations of possible coalition governments? Central to a mediatized system is premediation, the logic of mapping all likely scenarios for audiences before events happen, even if they never happen (Richard Grusin’s idea). Journalists form cultures marked by fallible expectations: in 2001 no US journalists saw another attack on the WTC coming, and in 2010 UK journalists had reached a consensus that Cameron would win outright. Consequently, the coalitions negotiations were not as mediatized as they could have been.

But what Anstead’s paper seems to suggest is this: Even if journalists are excluded from an event, the media ecology inhabited by political leaders, reporters and publics will shape what is thought possible, intelligible and legitimate, whether in domestic or international politics - an indirect but inescapable effect. Political processes can be un-mediated yet mediatized. He will present a more developed draft of his paper at the PSA Annual Convention in London in April, but if you are interested in receiving a copy please email N.M.Anstead@lse.ac.uk

Satellite Wars in the Middle East: A Battle for Hearts and Minds

Colleagues at Durham University are convening a forum forum titled 'Satellite Wars in the Middle East: A Battle for Hearts and Minds', to be held in the School of Government and International Affairs on Wednesday the 26th of January, commencing at 13:00. It will bring together distinguished scholars specialising in satellite television ownership and regulation in this region, to discuss the challenges raised by these issues. Click here for their poster.

Confirmed speakers include Prof. Naomi Sakr (University of Westminster); Dr. Katharina Noetzold (Free University, Berlin); Dr. Zahera Harb (University of Nottingham); Mr. Sadeq Saba (head of BBC Persian); Mr. John Shaw (senior telecommunications advisor); and Mr. Maximillian Hanska (LSE).

For more information, see www.dur.ac.uk/dgi. Attendance is free, subject to registration at dgi@dur.ac.uk by Monday 24th January.

PhD success for Chris Perkins

The NPCU's Chris Perkins successfully defended his doctoral thesis today. His thesis, National thinking and the politics of belonging in contemporary Japan: a constitutive constructivist approach, was examined by Lola Martinez (SOAS) and Gerard Delanty (University of Sussex). Chris began his PhD in 2007 after completing his MSc at Royal Holloway's Department of Politics and International Relations.

A great start to 2011 for Chris, who this week also started a permanent lectureship at Edinburgh University.

Congratulations from all at the NPCU!!

2011-04-20 Ben O'Loughlin to present at PSA 2011

Following Andrew Chadwick's presentation on April 19, Ben O'Loughlin will present at the UK Political Studies Association Annual Conference at London's Novotel West on Tuesday April 20 at 3pm. His paper, 'Young People and the postponement of politics: Media, Insecurity and Multiculturalism in the UK', will examine the obstacles to mobilisation experienced by young people in the UK who felt political grievances towards the War on Terror around the 2004-07 period. The paper is co-authored with Marie Gillespie of the Open University and features on a panel Youth, Citizenship and Politics. 

Full details of the panel are here. 

 

2011-04-19: Andrew Chadwick Presenting at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, London

Andrew Chadwick will be presenting a paper, "The Political Information Cycle in a Hybrid News System: the British Prime Minister and the 'Bullygate' Affair," at the UK Political Studies Association Annual Conference at London's Novotel West on Tuesday April 19 at 4pm.

Click here for the provisional panel details.

The research paper on which this presentation will be based may be downloaded here.

7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

A month into the official inquest into the ‘7/7’ London bombings of July 2005, it is clear that the governmental imperative to arrive at a clear, authoritative and final account of what happened on the day might prove impossible because of the unreliability of human memory. This was an event in which cameraphone footage from the scene was reaching the BBC within 20 minutes of the first of four explosions, and iconic images and memorial rituals were in place within days and weeks. Yet it took police four months to take witness statements and now five years for witnesses to testify in court. It is no wonder that discrepancies emerge. Not unlike 9/11, there are significant differences between sweeping media- and politically-driven narratives of national mourning and the local, particular perspectives of those involved.

An official record would offer some certainty to survivors, grieving relatives, and allow for objective assessment of how well emergency services performed. The inquest must be comprehensive and include as many voices as can offer salient information, it must be precise, and it must offer consensus and closure.  At a symposium, ‘Conflicts of Memory’ at the University of Nottingham last week, my regular co-author Andrew Hoskins, who has been following the inquest, talked about the inconsistencies emerging between individuals’ testimonies and even within individuals’ own accounts. One ambulance worker said he had drawn a diagram of where bodies were in a carriage on the day of 7/7; he now can’t remember where he drew the diagram or even whether it was someone else who drew it for him.

We can see this for ourselves; witnesses’ transcripts and the evidence in court are available online, the kind of transparency our new media ecology makes so easy. For instance, we can compare witness testimonies with visual representations of what they had seen. Survivors must now try to reconcile what they thought had happened with all of the conflicting verbal and pictorial versions being put before the court now.

For Hoskins, it is only by following how, over a long period, events become stretched and extended through complex relations and layers of objects, people and rituals that we can see how consensual memories may be formed. This is not dissimilar to Latour’s argument that law (and science) are merely a set of mediations which enough people can agree to go along with for pragmatic reasons. The result, as with the 7/7 inquest so far, is imperfect. Would it be better for the inquest to settle on a definitive set of technical drawings and edit out inconsistent testimonies in order to reach an official record? This might upset survivors who feel the memory they genuinely hold, and which they have lived with for over five years, has been crossed out as a mistake.

Alternatively, the British state could allow for a loose plurality of often-ambiguous accounts to stand together. There would be costs. But with the testimonies, diagrams and other evidence archived and publicly available online, they could decide to turn it over to the public to make connections and draw conclusions themselves. Inclusive but never definitive: judgement 2.0?

Postgraduate Conference: December 17: Questioning Transnationalism: Culture, Politics, and Media

QUESTIONING TRANSNATIONALISM: CULTURE, POLITICS & MEDIA
Date: 17 December 2010
Venue: Arts Building, Royal Holloway College, University of London
Sponsors: The Department of Media Arts and the Department of Politics and International Relations
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Thomas Diez (Political Science, University of Tübingen), Prof. David Chandler (Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster), Prof. Randall Halle (Department of German, University of Pittsburgh).
 
This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference focuses on transnationalism and securitisation, issues of increasing relevance in both Politics and International Relations, and Media and Film Studies. In both disciplines, there is currently a prevailing tendency to conceive of borders as ever increasingly permeable elements in a globalising world. New communication technologies have certainly reinforced the image that the world becomes a single place. However, a ‘borderless world’ proves to be illusionary as witnessed in the global rise of securitization practices after the September 11 terrorist attacks. ‘Transnationalism' thereby becomes a useful lens through which issues such as securitisation, borders, legitimacy, citizenship, memory and solidarity can be re-examined from a fresh theoretical perspective.
 
Within this framework, the major aims of this international conference are threefold: to question the extent and limitations of transnationalism; to analyse the cultural and political functions of transnational actors and the impact of new communication technologies such as the internet in the contemporary world; and finally to encourage interdisciplinary approaches and critical perspectives in the studies of transnationalism. 
 
All are welcome! For further details, including the final programme and abstracts, please see: http://royalhollowayconference.com

New Article: Britain's First Live Televised Party Leaders' Debate: From the News Cycle to the Political Information Cycle

Chadwick, A. (2011) "Britain's First Live Televised Party Leaders' Debate: From the News Cycle to the Political Information Cycle" Parliamentary Affairs 64 (1), pp. 1-21.

Abstract

Britain's first ever live, televised, party leaders' debate took place on 15 April 2010, during one of the most intriguing and closely fought general election campaigns in living memory. Arguably the most important single development in the media's treatment of politics since the arrival of television during the 1959 campaign, the leaders' debate and its aftermath provide a unique window on the political communication environment of contemporary Britain. This article focuses on the surrounding processes of mediation before, during and after the event, particularly the interactions between broadcasting, press and online media, including citizen opinion expressed and coordinated through online social network sites. A narrative reconstruction of journalists', political parties' and online activists' behaviour raises the question of whether traditional understandings of the "news cycle" should now be replaced by a broader concern with what I term "political information cycles": assemblages of personnel, practices, genres and temporalities in which supposedly "new" online media are increasingly integrated with supposedly "old" broadcast and press media.

Link.

For more of my publications, please see my personal website.