As part of a joint panel sponsored by Bibliographical Society of Canada Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture and the Canadian Historical Association Media and Communications History Committee, DeNel presented her evolving ideas about institutional trust work. The panel was titled 'The Intersection of Broadcasting and Print.'
Using data gleaned from the Beyond the Book project and current thinking on literacy, DeNel presented 'The Role of Community in Transformational Literacy' to the OCLC Americas Regional Conference Meeting and Symposium, at the annual Canadian Libraries Association meetings in Halifax, NS, Canada. The talk encouraged the audience to contemplate different ideas about literacy and to reach out to groups who might not feel comfortable visiting libraries.
A video of the talk is available here.
The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, hosted Danielle as a visiting lecturer in The Barbara Powell Lecture in the Humanities series. '"Everything becomes alive!": The Pleasures and Meanings of Shared Reading in the Twenty-First Century' was the title of her presentation, which analyzed the various pleasures that readers derive from their participation in shared reading activities and critiqued the meanings of reading promoted by the organizers of mass reading events.
Danielle was invited to talk about the research methods we used to interrogate contemporary meanings of readings for the Seminar on the Study of Literary Reading at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. She titled her presentation 'Mixing Methods in the Tradition of Cultural Studies: A Methodological Snapshot of the Beyond the Book Project.'
As part of a panel called 'A Question of Value: Richard & Judy's Book Club,' Danielle presented our ideas about high and popular culture that came out of our focus group interviews with participants and non participants of the televised book club couple at the 'Selling Culture': Association for Research in Popular Culture Annual Conference at the Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
DeNel presented research findings that illustrated the different levels of trust readers have among radio, television and public library reading recommendations for the "The library recommends this. It must be a good book, I'm going to read it: Hierarchies of Trust in an Era of Broadcast and City-Wide Book Programs" for Library History Seminar XII: "Libraries in the History of Print Culture," which was a Conference of the Center for the History of Print Culture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
As an invited speaker, Danielle presented a reprise of the Eccles lecture (see below) called 'Citizen Reader: Canadian Literature, Mass Reading Events and the Promise of Belonging' for the Department of English Seminar Series at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
DeNel presented at the 'unconference' called BookCamp Halifax 2010. Her presentation called Social Change: Reading from Below in Contemporary Urban Centres introduced two groups that the project team discovered during their field work. Get into Reading (UK) and Literature for all of Us (USA) are two different yet similar shared reading programs that reach out to groups who might not otherwise have access to books and storytelling.
Danielle provided the Plenary Keynote Lecture for The Fifth Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Association for Canadian Studies Conference, University of Cambridge. The lecture was titled 'Citizen Reader: Canadian Literature, Mass Reading Events and the Promise of Belonging.' The talk explored the affective connections and the affective experiences of citizenship that are made possible through practices of shared reading. 'Citizen Reader' also examined why so many Canadian readers want to read nationally and regionally.
Danielle took part in the third and final 'TransCanada' conference at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. Her presentation considered why the study of readers and reading matters for the field of 'Canadian Literature' and drew upon some of the Canadian research data from 'Beyond the Book.'
Dr Anouk Lang gave a paper entitled, 'Middle of the road or
divergent paths? Imagining the nation through Three Day Road' at
the 'Middlebrow Cultures' conference, University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow.
The conference was part of the Middlebrow Network project which
is funded by the AHRC and lead by Dr Faye Hammill who has a
Birmingham connection: Faye undertook her PhD studies at U of
Birmingham in the Dept of American & Canadian Studies.
Anouk Lang presented a paper at the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). Dr Lang's presentation was entitled, "Divergent Paths?' Postcolonialism, Book History and Three Day Road."
Danielle Fuller was an invited plenary speaker at a symposium organized by the German-Canadian Centre, University of Bonn. The symposium was convened by Katherine Verhagen and was entitled, 'Organic Material: the Many Threads of Canadian Book History.' In addition to delivering a presentation on the 'Beyond the Book' project, she was a member of a panel discussion which focussed upon 'The Changing Needs of the Canadian Market.' Keynote speakers and fellow panel members were Prof David Staines (U of Ottawa) and Prof George Elliott Clarke (U of Toronto).
DeNel Rehberg Sedo presented a paper at the conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Cultures during the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, U of Ottawa. Her presentation was entitled, 'Cultural capital and community in contemporary city-wide reading programs,' which chimed well with this year's CASBC theme, 'Book Networks and Cultural Capital: Space, Society & the Nation'
Danielle participated in a roundtable on the 'US-Canada Border' at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at the University of Keele, 18 March 2009. Her contribution was entitled: 'The "Porous" Border: A Cultural-Materialist Overview.'
SHARP, Oxford Brookes University, 24 June-27 June 2008
Re-Encounters: Politics, Practices and Problems within Contemporary Event-based Cultures of Reading in North America and the UK
Rehberg Sedo, 'Close Encounters of a Mediated Kind: Rethinking Book Audience through "Richard & Judy's Book Club" and "Canada Reads."
Lang, "One Book, Whose Community? Encountering Others through Mass Reading Events."
Fuller, "Labours of Love - A Reader-Researcher's True Story."
SHARP abstracts and panel descriptions
Anouk Lang gave a paper at a GIS conference which drew upon data gathered as part of our BTB work in Seattle in 2007. Dr Lang used elements of GIS technology to explore the types and limits of methods and analyses appropriate to an examination of the city's literary culture. Her presentation was entitled: "Mapping reading, reading mapping: Using GIS to explore contemporary literary culture." The conference was 'Historical GIS 2008', University of Essex, UK, August 2008.
Reading the Evidence, Institute for English Studies, U of London, 21-23 July 2008
In search of the 21st century reader: methods, media and mediations
Fuller, 'Mixing it up: Investigating shared reading in an event-based culture.'
Lang, 'Field notes from an asymptote: Pursuing the readers of
Andrea Levy's Small Island.'
Rehberg Sedo, 'Richard & Judy's Book Club' and 'Canada
Reads': Readers, books and cultural programming in a digital
era.
Danielle Fuller gave an invited plenary presentation to a fabulous group of Scottish librarians and cultural workers at Napier University on 20 June 2008. She shared the preliminary statistical results from our UK data as part of her talk entitled, 'Open Up the Book, Open Up Yourself': What Readers Think About 'One Book, One Community.' She was also one of several workshop leaders participating in this CPD event organized by Prof Alistair McCleery of the Scottish Centre for the Book. The event was: 'Cities of Literature, Cities of Reading,' Reader Development Symposium. The Scottish Centre for the Book organized the day in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council and Edinburgh City of Literature.
Anouk Lang's paper 'Reading (in) the News: Understanding Media Discourse Around Community Reading Events' employs methods from corpus linguistics to analyse over 1.6 million words of media discourse about Canada Reads, The Big Read and Richard and Judy's Book Club. A shorter version of this paper was delivered at the 2007 Corpus Linguistics conference. (ca. 11 000w)
DeNel Rehberg Sedo gave this presentation to the Union for Democratic Communication entitled 'Searching for good news about American literary culture: Questioning enclosure and emancipation in a nation-wide reading program'.
Searching for good news about American literary cultureDanielle Fuller gave a paper at the MA in Publishing Programme/Research Seminar Series at Oxford Brookes University on 20 November 07. The abstract is below. There is a web page about the seminar, where a podcast of the paper can be downloaded.
Drawing upon the approaches and preliminary findings of the interdisciplinary research project, 'Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, USA and Canada,' (www.beyondthebookproject.org) I will consider some of the strategies, challenges and lines of investigation open to us as students of contemporary book culture. I hope this presentation will be of interest to anyone who is a reader-participant in shared reading (through membership in a book club, for instance) and to those who are intrigued by the popularity of literary fiction in the early 21st century.
Danielle Fuller gave a paper at the TransCanada conference at the University of Guelph, 11-14 October 07. Entitled "Beyond CanLit(e): Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Trans-Atlantically", it is available online at http://www.transcanadas.ca/transcanada2_pos.html.
Danielle Fuller sat on a panel entitled 'Imagined Spaces' at the Performing Regions/Regional Performance conference at Lancaster University, in conjunction with the Institute for Advanced Studies, 17-19 Sept 2007.
This paper was given by Danielle Fuller at The Ethics of
Reading: The 14th Summer School of Cultural Studies Research
Centre for Contemporary Culture in the University of
Jyväskylä in Finland and The Finnish Network for Cultural
Studies, 4-7 June 07. It was also given at the RIMAD (Research
Institute for Media, Art and Design) research seminar series at
the University of Bedfordshire on 21 November 07. The abstract is
below.
This presentation explores selected material from my current
interdisciplinary collaborative team research project: "Beyond
the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of
Reading in the UK, USA and Canada."
(www.beyondthebookproject.org). The study investigates reading as
a social practice by examining various iterations of "mass
reading events" such as city-wide "One Book, One Community"
programs and selected mass-mediated book clubs (e.g. the UK's
"Richard & Judy's Book Club" on TV). After a brief
introduction to the project through an outline of the key
research questions and the study's mixed method design, I will
focus upon an issue that is proving to be both unsettling and
intriguing to us as researchers: how to critique and
conceptualise the labour of cultural workers without being
"literally critical" of them - that is, devaluing their work as
cultural mediators? This is an ethical question with both
practical and intellectual consequences that I will examine as I
work towards a more nuanced understanding of the ideological,
material and emotional labour expended by reading event
organizers. Their shared and explicitly declared "passion for
reading" is, I will argue, an epistemological clue that I will
pursue through a small series of case studies. As part of my
critical reflections upon research practice and its theoretical
problems, I will analyse the labour of "grassroots" cultural
workers -- the supposed "renegades" -- and those who are situated
inside public institutions -- including one "rock star"
librarian.
I hope that this presentation will be of interest not only to
cultural studies - colleagues working out of different
disciplinary trainings, but also to anyone who is a
reader-participant in shared reading (through membership in a
book club, for instance) and to those people who are intrigued by
the popularity of literary fiction in the early 21st century.
This flyer supplies more details about the Reading Experience Database (a joint project of the Open University and the Institute of English Studies, University of London) and explains how individuals can help with the research by sending in examples of reading from 1450-1945.
The Reading Experience Database flyer
Danielle Fuller, DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Anouk Lang gave a panel at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference in Istanbul, held from 19-23 July 06. The panel, entitled 'Reading Matters: The Commodification of Contemporary Book Cultures in the UK & North America', looked at One Book One Chicago, publishers' attempts to market books to book groups over the internet, and the ideological currents circulating in Canada Reads.
Fuller, Sedo & Lang Crossroads 06 abstracts
Danielle Fuller and Anouk Lang delivered papers at the conference of the British Association for Canadian Studies at held in April 2006 at New Hall, Cambridge. Abstracts of their papers may be found below.
Fuller & Lang BACS 06 abstracts
An overview of mass reading events and a discussion of the 'One Book, One Community' programme in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. This paper was delivered at the 'Material Cultures and Creation of Knowledge' conference at the University of Edinburgh (The Centre for the History of the Book), 22-24 July, 2005.
MASS READING, NEW KNOWLEDGE?