Watching the Media

Censorship and its limits in media creative practice will be examined during a special one-day research symposium at Edge Hill University.

Practitioners in press roles and the arts face numerous limits and controls, so the aim of the event is to explore how practitioners respond to these constraints in social, cultural and political contexts.

Watching the Media - Censorship, Limits and Control in Creative Practice on 15th April will look at how practice is often politicised in relation to power and how practitioners themselves envisage the pressure and limitations affecting thinking, production and performance.

It has been organised by MECCSA and the University's Media Department with the aim of producing a framework for understanding the limits of contemporary practice in Britain and offer the industry and government bodies some recommendations for the future.

Lecturer James Snazell, who is involved in organising the symposium, explained: "Although freedom of expression is thought of as one of the hallmarks of a democratic society, actual democracies vary considerably in the degrees of freedom which they permit.

"Censorship can be regarded as a moral or political issue, or corporate constraints.  Many of these debates are now held in relation to new technologies and their potential for disrupting once clearly delineated boundaries, producing a hiatus in regulation frameworks, renegotiating the role of the consumer-practitioner and bringing new subjectivities into the creative process. The symposium will investigate the role of censorship in creative media practices and will look to offer solutions."

Keynote speakers include Julian Petley, Professor of Screen Media and Journalism at Brunel University, who argues thatcontrary to the impression given by the popular press, crusading politicians and various pressure groups, censorship is alive and well in the UK. His paper, Freedoms of Expressions versus the Need for Protection: An Overview of Current Laws and Regulationswill outline some of the ways in which this works, with particular reference to representations which involve images of sexuality and/or violence.

David Nash, Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University, will present Models of Censorship: The Example of Blasphemy. Best known for his work on the history of blasphemy, he has given advice to MPs as well as giving evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Religious Offences in 2003. Within the last year he has advised groups in Ireland about the recent legislative changes that have altered the crime of blasphemy in that country.

Dennis Hayes, Professor of Education at the University of Derby, will present Fear and Self-Censorship in the Academy. The founder of Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) will argue that in universities today it is not public or managerial censorship but self-censorship that is the threat to academic freedom.

Papers will also be presented by:

• Esra Arsan, Istanbul Bilgi University, who will talk aboutwhy particular news stories are being censored in Turkey.
• Stephen Carver, University of East Anglia, will examine horror and censorship, offering an original contextualisation of the post-war genre in America, centring on the influence of EC horror comics, and starting with the moral panic of 1954.
• Roger Cottrell, Edge Hill University, will look at how the proliferation of internet use has challenged the dominant hegemony in efforts to censor and manage information. Particular interest will be the cultural impact of these developments before and after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Prof. Tomasz Malinowski, Edge Hill University and Lincoln University, will address the issue of censorship from the point of view of a filmmaker in communist Poland and in Brezhnev's Russia.
• Jennifer Skellington, Oxford Brookes University, will investigate censorship of music criticism within the English broadsheet press from 1981 to 2011.

The symposium on 15^th April is from 9.30am to 5pm and is £25. Concessions are available for Edge Hill University staff and doctoral students. To register, contact Debbie Chadford on 01696 584534 or email chadford@edgehill.ac.uk.