“It’s Like Being Back in GCSE Art”—Engaging with Music, Film-Making and Boardgames. Creative Pedagogies within Youth Work Education

Creative pedagogies within youth work practice are well established. Practitioners working with young people are often called upon to utilise their own personal and professional ‘toolboxes’, as a way of supporting ‘Creative Arts Youth Work’. However, within Higher Education (HE), creative methods for teaching and learning within the university context are often overlooked. The problem posed by this article is: how can HE ‘catch-up’ with more advanced pedagogies in the field of practice? Despite a recent focus on the personalisation of learning within HE, how can arts-based pedagogies, including digital storytelling, be drawn upon to enhance the learning experience? This article reports on three areas of pedagogical innovation engaged with by students undertaking the Youth Studies degree at Nottingham Trent University. Three experimental initiatives are explored, which assisted in educating informal educators, through creative learning techniques. Engaging with music, film-making and boardgames are given as examples of creative pedagogy, reporting on both my own practical experience in organising these activities and student feedback. Results showed that the symbiosis of creative pedagogies with relational and experiential learning, key tenets of youth work practice, offered expressive and authentic conditions for learning that are based upon student’s experiences. Therefore, there is much to learn from youth work courses within HE, not only in terms of engaging and encouraging students through creativity, but also setting the scene for the future of creative youth work practice.

Mass Media and Consumer Culture in 20th-Century Mexico

In 20th-century Mexico, as in many other places, consumer culture and mass media have shaped everyday experiences, helped give meaning to ordinary lives, and opened up spaces in which political ideologies could be created and contested. Cultural forms such as dance, song, cuisine, clothing, and sports have been deployed to distinguish regions from one another, while at the same time, print media, radio, television, recorded music, film, and other cultural forms have connected Mexicans across regional and international borders (and across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, language, religion, political affiliation, and more) from the 1880s to the present day. Consumer culture—meaning the distribution, sale, and use of mass-produced goods such as clothing, as well as agricultural commodities like sugar and coffee—linked Mexico to a wider world in the historical era in which Mexico joined in the global process of rapid-fire modernization. The study of mass media and consumer culture in Mexico has been, at its best, highly interdisciplinary: historians and art historians, literary critics and cinema studies specialists, sociologists, and ethnographers have worked with journalists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and others in developing a sophisticated scholarly literature. This literature has its roots in two interrelated schools of scholarship: one that interpreted the products of culture industries as well as the creativity of ordinary people in a search for clues to Mexican national identity, and another that interpreted both locally made and imported mass media to understand how they shaped and supported the political, social, and economic status quo, both locally and globally. Since the 1980s, however, scholarly attention has broadened its focus from the images, narratives, movements, sounds, and objects produced by Mexican and foreign culture industries, and recent scholarship has looked to processes of creation, distribution, criticism, and consumption as well. Identities—whether regional, national, local, ideological, sexual, or political—are no longer understood as stable categories, but rather as a highly contested set of ideas, stories, and pictures that have changed radically over time. Much scholarship on mass media and consumer culture now begins with the understanding that culture industries have provided the tools with which discourses of identity could be shaped and reshaped, and that audiences and consumers have sometimes picked up those tools and turned them to their own purposes. And they have moved beyond taking the nation as a central category of analysis to ask how Mexican consumers and culture industries have participated in international and transnational processes of modernization.

Streaming across industries

This article explores streaming across the cultural industries, drawing on 39 interviews with CEO/top-level industry executives working in the Norwegian music, film, television, and book industries. We examine two broad questions: What dokey industry players see as the main opportunities and challenges of streaming?To what extent do industry players compare with and learn from other industries when making sense of, and seeking solutions to, the main challenges? Drawing on theories of media industry logics and industry lore, the article identifi es a collective understanding of turmoil and uncertainty. While informants across industries formsimilar notions about the impact of streaming and emphasise the need to learn from other industries, solutions to challenges are typically sought within industryspecific frames. Our findings suggest that even if streaming is a cross-industrial trend, strategies are based on industry-specific logics and notions.

APPLICATION OF CROWDFUNDING AS AN ALTERNATIVE SOURCE OF PROJECT FINANCING IN EU COUNTRIES - ASSUMPTIONS OF ITS DEVELOPMENT IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND CROATIA

A new economic trend in the financing of projects, start-ups, innovative projects and many other projects from various fields (music, film, games) is widespread today and its called crowdfunding or group financing. With the development of new technologies, and thus social networks around the world, it creates the possibility and potential advantage of associating around the world in raising funds in an alternative way. Crowdfunding can be organized in several forms or models. The basic division is the one that is carried out by the European Commission: Reward-based crowdfunding, Donation-based crowdfunding, Share-based crowdfunding and Investment-based crowdfunding. The crowdfunding market is constantly growing. As conditions for traditional funding become more stringent, crowdfunding could be a potential key to success. Prospects for the development of crowdfunding in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia are reflected in the legal regulation of this method of financing, which would facilitate administrative work, reduce handling costs and create legal certainty. Following the established regulations, intensive attention should be dedicated to the promotion of crowdfunding and "raising awareness" of citizens, pointing out the possible benefits and advantages that it offers. This will take some time, so that in the foreseeable future, alternative financing of crowdfunding will gain in importance in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.

Music Supervision and Branding in an Era of “Convergent Advertising”

At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the popular music ecosystem moved from a system devoted to the sale of objects to one centered on data. As such, musicians began to seek new sources of income to replace the sale of recordings and moved toward licensing and brand management. At the same time, as platforms of video distribution began to proliferate and the demand for content generated an abundance of media franchises, the need to stand out required new aesthetic investments to establish immediate brand recognition. These two new media developments generated a convergence of opportunities for strategic music supervision and placement in television and film projects. This chapter draws primarily from trade literature to illustrate how actors in music, film, and television began to recognize and develop coordinating mutually beneficial practices where every party potentially benefits through the elevation of their brand profiles.

Kevin Barry’s Atlantic Drift

Kevin Barry is a short story writer, novelist, dramatist, and editor, with Olivia Smith, of Winter Papers, an annual anthology of contemporary Irish writing. His work is steeped in music, film, and television, and echoes with their influence. Underpinning this is an attachment to writers like Dermot Healy and John McGahern, both novelists whose importance to a writer like Barry makes all the more sense from a coastal, and an archipelagic, perspective. His binding theme is disappointment and his lyricism is braided into the tragic perspective his characters, and his narrators, have of the human condition, which is for the most part a tilting balance between anxiety and drink. These edgy narratives are often set in wet weather by the sea and as so often in this book, the coastal margin operates as a hydroscape in which the boundaries between innocence and experience fragment and shift.

Gender, Sexuality, and Borders in Popular Culture

The theorizing of gender, sexuality, and borders emerged from borderland theory as conceptualized by Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa. Enacted in this theory are racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities and relationships to land, and the U.S.–Mexico border in particular. Borderland theory embraces the immigrants, the exiles, the mixed-race, the queers, the nonnormative, the crossers of binaries, broadly defined. Borderland pedagogies build upon borderland theory, encouraging recognition of diverse experiences, critical and flexible thinking, creativity, and acceptance of one’s contradictions. Popular culture serves as an important tool for borderland pedagogies, both as a resource for classroom teaching and as a broad-reaching medium to promote public learning. Music, film, literature, and television provide rich sources for learning and unlearning. Gender and sexual diversity in borderland popular culture are the outliers of heteronormativity and challenge dualistic notions of sex and gender. The borderland provide the symbolic location of the restrictions and wounds caused by binary thinking, as well as the place to recuperate, to heal, to learn, and to transform.

The Entertainment Press

This chapter provides an overview of the sector: the music and entertainment press’s antecedents, general functions and audiences. It analyses how papers, which reported upon art, music, film, theatre, dancing, comedy and variety performances, fulfilled a number of functions beside description and analysis. It explores their close ties to the entertainment industry: how they advocated their sector’s interests, publicised their commercial products and fostered networks of communication. The chapter then illustrates how, for most readers, entertainment and music papers described developments in modern urban, cosmopolitan leisure which readers could then interact with. Papers and magazines were gatekeepers for leisure opportunities, fashions and the informed consumption of mechanically reproduced mass culture. The chapter considers two publications that defined the twentieth century entertainment press – Sight & Sound and Melody Maker – in detail. By exploring the changes to these papers and comparing them to their competitors, this chapter will explain historical development in the music and entertainment press’s role, interests and register. It therefore demonstrates the papers interactions with and, sometimes, influence upon broader movements in society and culture.