Holmfirth Film Festival talk

Journalism lecturer and radio broadcaster Clare Jenkins gave a talk about British New Wave cinema at Holmfirth Film Festival on 24^th May.

The talk was based on interviews Clare conducted with some of the ‘angry young men’ (and one woman) writers of the late 1950s and early 60s, for a BBC Radio 4 series called Still Angry After All These Years.

To make the series, she visited Nottingham with novelist Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Wakefield and Dewsbury with Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), and Barnsley and Hoyland Common with Barry Hines (A Kestrel for a Knave, later made into the film Kes, directed by Ken Loach).

She also met rugby players at Featherstone Rovers in the company of TV presenter Ian Clayton for a programme about David Storey’s This Sporting Life. Finally, she interviewed playwright and novelist Nell Dunn at her London home to talk about her ground-breaking 60s novel and film, Up the Junction.

Still Angry… was presented by Clare, who co-runs independent radio production company Pennine Productions. Her talk at the film festival, which is now in its third year, gave behind-the-scenes accounts of the inspirations for the books, the authors’ views of the films, and Clare’s (mainly positive!) experiences of working with the novelists.

Co-organiser of the Sexual Cultures conference

Prof Feona Attwood co-organised the ‘Sexual Cultures’ conference at Brunel University in April 2012.

The key themes of the conference were:

• Sex and Technology
• The Regulation of Sex
• Working Sex
• Researching Everyday Sex

Keynote presentations were given by:

• Judith Halberstam, Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies, University of Southern California
• Katrien Jacobs, Associate Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Fiona Patten, Australian Sex Party
• Martin Barker, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Aberystwyth
• Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland
• Sharif Mowlabocus, Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Sussex

We had over 150 delegates from 21 countries and the event was very successful.

There is more information on the conference blog, including a series of posts from the conference by the journalist, Jane Fae.

Communication challenges for Karen exiles

Dr Geff Green, Communications gave a lunchtime research seminar on ”Keeping in Touch: Communication challenges for Karen exiles in Sheffield” at the  Communication & Computing Research Centre.

Ethnic Karen refugees from the Burmese regime have faced some very particular challenges since their arrival in the UK over the last few years. One of these is their difficulties in maintaining links with dispersed families, friends and associates in diverse locations around the world. Geff Green talked about the research he has been doing with Dr Eleanor Lockley for the last three years with this community which has examined the characteristics of the communication practices of the community and how this fits with a complex construction of identity which has political, religious and ethnic dimensions. He also discussed  some of the challenges that researchers face when working with a displaced refugee ‘community’ whose collectivity, uniformity and cohesion can’t be assumed.

Alumni in Regional Press awards

A former SHU journalism student, Danny Hall, has scooped a prestigious prize in the Regional Press awards, just over year since graduation. Danny was one of five young journalists shortlisted for the Weekly Sports Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Sheffield Star at a ceremony in London on Friday June 22nd.

The awards were judged by the Society of Editors and celebrate the best of British Regional Newspaper journalism.

Congratulations to Danny – just goes to show what our graduates can achieve!

Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Industry Event

A ‘CIPR Industry Event’ took place on Friday 27th April. It was attended by students from all levels of all three undergraduate PR courses at Sheffield Hallam University. Three speakers gave talks/workshops:

• Helen Standing, the CIPR regional ‘Young Communicator of the Year’ who talked about breaking into PR
• Abby Worsnip from HRMedia who talked about crisis management using Forgemasters’ experience of losing their multi-million pound loan as a case study
• Surriya Falconer, Director of ‘Make Things Happen’ PR agency who talked about her long and illustrious career in PR.

The feedback from students was universally very positive and we’ll run a similar event next year.

Reflective group blogging

In early April 2012, Florence Dujardin led a workshop on reflective group blogging at the conference of the Association for Learning Development. The workshop shared some general ideas behind the design of the WordPress blog used in 2010-11 to support the MA module entitled Portfolio of Reflective Practice.

Reflective group blogging

Genres across the disciplines: students writing in HE

Hilary Nesi, Professor in English Language, University of Coventry, led a session at Sheffield Hallam University on the British Academic Written English corpus – a collection of almost 3000 pieces of undergraduate and Master’s level student assignments from 30 disciplines, from the humanities to sciences . This body of work provides insights into how different academic use similar words in very different ways, or how groups, such as international students, use words in different patterns and form. This provides tutors with ideas on how to explain what they are asking students to undertake in assignments, and insights into student writing in higher education. The project also shows how tutors use similar works to explain assessments – but could be asking students to produce different forms of information or responses.

Prof. Nesi’s session made student advisors and academics aware of the challenge of how to explain to students what we ask for when setting assignments. Asking for ‘essays’, ‘case studies’ and ‘proposals’ or ‘methodology recounts’ could mean very different forms of writing to different tutors. It is no wonder that at times students become confused about what tutors are asking them to do in a task.

More background on Prof. Nesi and her work can be found online.