Returning the Parthenon Marbles: A Conversation with Baroness Chakrabarti
by Kirsty Warner The question ‘should the UK return colonial artefacts?’ has been a consistent and widely debated topic. However, with large institutions such as the Ethnological Museum, Berlin and the Smithsonian Institution returning objects, there has been a growing pressure for western museums to return colonial objects accessioned to their collections. One of the…
An Invitation to Translate
Dr Ricarda Vidal How do you translate a poem into a film, how do you render a soundscape in words, what will this look like when it is turned back into a poem? How could it be performed? I’d like to invite you to listen, watch and read the example below – and as you…
Why Queer Fashion is important
Veronica Gargallo Llamas When I tell people that I am doing my research on the topic of ‘queer fashion’ they mostly respond by saying that it sounds interesting or ‘cool’ but not necessarily knowing what it means exactly. I don’t blame them, even researching the subject myself sometimes I struggle to pinpoint an exact concrete…
Care and co-creation – CMCI students explore the civic role of arts
The past year has been a challenging one, with COVID-19 uprooting our lives but also sparking thoughts and desires about how we might want to reset the way we want to live and how communities operate. As we slowly emerge into whatever might be the ‘new normal’, arts organisations are helping to shape the future:…
Care Manifesto
Manfredi de Bernard and Takao Terui The Care Manifesto stresses the need for and elaborates on an alternative to the neoliberal principles that regulate both our personal and shared existence. Informed by feminist, antiracist and eco-socialist theories, the authors argue for a radical change in the current understandings of human life, individualist and productivity. They…
A PhD Overview in Three Acts: Cauldrons, Super Bowls and Export-grade Joy
Dr Camilo Solinti Soler Caicedo On January 11th, 2020, on a final wrap-up fieldwork visit, I was approached by a hip-hop dancer, who had seemingly heard of my research on salsa: “Brayan: They told me you are doing a research to find out why the best dancers always come from the ghettoCamilo: You could say……
The Asian Cultural Policy Research Seminar Series
Takao Teuri Dr Hye-Kyung Lee (CMCI), Karin Chau (CMCI), and I (Takao Terui, CMCI) launched a new seminar series titled Asian Cultural Policy Research Seminar Series (ACPRSS). This series aims to broaden our understandings about the cultural and creative industries /cultural policy and to contribute to de-Westernising this field and de-colonising our curriculum, by sharing voices…
Emotionally Demanding Research in Lockdown
Lauren Cantillon One definition of ‘emotionally demanding research’ is ‘research that demands a tremendous amount of mental, emotional, or physical energy and potentially affects or depletes the researcher’s health or well-being’ (Kumar and Cavallaro, 2017, p.648). There is an ever-growing literature on how to protect the mental wellbeing of a researcher or research team when…
Facebook as Focus Group Tool
Katrin Schindel Faced with the impossibility of conducting research in person due to the current pandemic, many researchers find themselves looking for alternative online methods. This often poses new practical and ethical considerations, with some academics trying out online research they might not have encountered yet. Since my PhD project has been designed as an…
Lockdown Fashion: An exploration of dressing at home in 2020
Yana Reynolds As a fashion sociologist, I have always been fascinated by everyday sartorial behaviours as a mechanism that allows to ‘articulate the relationship between a particular body and its lived milieu, the space occupied by bodies and constituted by bodily actions’, as fashion theorist Jennifer Craik put it. But what happens to dress in…
East Asian Popular Culture as a Disruptor 2020 Symposium Report
Liang Ge The East Asian Popular Culture as a Disruptor Symposium was successfully held at King’s College London on 6th March 2020 attended by 15 PhD students and early career researchers across the UK. As the initiator and organiser of this symposium, I would like to, first of all, express my sincere thanks to all…
Practising Hope in the Netherlands
Dr Jonathan Gross Just three days after the UK left the European Union I travelled to Nijmegen in the eastern Netherlands. I was there to visit the HAN University of Applied Sciences, which holds an annual International Week. This is the opportunity for students to attend workshops offered by academics from across Europe and beyond. I…
Understanding contemporary Chinese national identity formation through Taiwan
Andong Li Scholarship of nationalism studies has been trying hard to respond to the paradox that nationalist sentiment sharply surges in many countries while the world is becoming more digitalised and globalised. It seems to be increasingly obvious that the cosmopolitan promise of globalisation and digitisation has failed, and cross-Strait (Chinese mainland-Taiwan) relations might be…
The ‘Migration Crisis’ in Italy: a Crisis of Identity?
Maria Paola Pofi My PhD research project aims at investigating the phenomena of human mobility (migration) and mediated mobility (mediation) across national borders through a study of migrant transnational lives in Italy. In particular, placing the research within the context of the ‘migration crisis’ – and the conflicts over cultural diversity it triggered – has…
Chile: Doing research in times of social change
Catalina Urtubia Figueroa Just two months ago, Chilean president Sebastian Piñera stated in a televised interview that Chile was “an oasis in Latin America”, referring to its stable democracy and growing economy. On October 18th, it became evident that Chile was more likely to be a mirage when mass protests kicked off in Santiago due…
#KuñaJesareko: Instagram as a place for the female gaze
Jazmín Ruiz Díaz I have recently had the opportunity of presenting my book chapter The Female Gaze in Times of Selfies as a member of the Feminist & Gender Research Reading Group at King’s/Queen Mary (Liss DTP). This chapter — part of the book Amalgama: Women, Identity & Diaspora— represents the culmination of what started…
Intersemiotic Journeys between Practice and Theory
Dr Ricarda Vidal Can we translate between poetry and dance, between painting and music, between scent and performance in the same way as we translate between French and English in literary translation? How would such a translation differ from response, adaptation or illustration? And what might we find out about communication if we tried to…
A Window into South Africa through Reality TV and Social Media
Addiel Dzinoreva In 1994 South Africa finally ended apartheid and a new country led by Nelson Mandela was born, carrying the hopes and dreams of previously disenfranchised black people. For black people in the media and creative industries, and hopeful storytellers like myself, there was great excitement about the opportunities the new dispensation provided for…
Researching Media, Gender, and Sexuality in East Asia
Dr Eva Cheuk-Yin Li Broadly speaking, my academic and teaching interests focus on two inter-related areas. Firstly, East Asian media and culture. Secondly, gender and sexuality through the lens of the multi-directional flows of transnational and regional popular culture, audience participation (or non-participation), and everyday practices. I am interested in understanding the interplay between media…
The Feminist Research Reading Group
Katrin Schindel The Feminist Research Reading Group has emerged out of the LISS-facilitated “Feminist Methods” seminar that took place at King’s College in the summer of 2018. The group is run by three PhD students, Sarah Louise Marks (Business School, Queen Mary), Sally King (Global Health & Social Medicine, King’s), and Katrin Schindel (CMCI, King’s). Our aim is to continue…
Culture Media and Creative Industries @ Kings 