Mintel's new Green and Ethical Consumers report

Mintel's new Green and Ethical Consumers report, published in January 2007, is now available online.
The report provides a wealth of information covering: Changing attitudes to ethical and environmental issues; Ethical fashion; discussion on whether companies are genuinely interested in ethical issues or just trying to look good; Ethical issues as they affect a range of sectors (grocery shopping; energy, fashion; beauty; travel; financial products); the Organic sector; Fair trade; and even organic weddings!
The Library has subscribed to Mintel's British Lifestyles report for a number of years, and the March 2007 edition is now available online.
This wide ranging report covers population, housing and lifestyle trends; saving habits; leisure activities; marriage and divorce trends; civil partnership statistics; employment trends; cultural trends; youth; women; retirement; sexuality; religion; Internet use; life stage variations in consumer and behaviour patterns, etc.
In short, if you are interested in social and cultural trends and change in Britain, there will be plenty to interest you within these two reports. Both provide the most recently available statistics.
The Mintel database provides expert reports with detailed information on consumer buying patterns, product and service sector performance, and social trends. Our subscription also includes: all UK Market Intelligence reports; European Consumer Goods Intelligence; Food and Drink reports; and UK Fashion Retail reports.
You can access the Mintel database via the Electronic Resources section of the Library website www.ucreative.ac.uk/library
If you wish to access the Mintel reports off campus, but do not know your Athens login details, please ask at your home campus Library.

Regards
Lincoln
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Lincoln Woods
LLC Electronic Systems and Services Manager
University College for the Creative Arts at
Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester
Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS
lwoods@ucreative.ac.uk
t: 01252 892719
f: 01252 892725

Fine Art and Architecture Research Seminar - Canterbury

Fine Art and Architecture Research Seminar
Thursday 1 February
Seminar Room next to the Cragg, Canterbury: 12 -1.30pm.

Dr Victoria Kelley, Reader in Fashion Theory, UCCA, Rochester

'Frayed Garments, Starched Linen: work in progress on abjection and its denial in clothing'

The character of designed objects is dependent on qualities of surface and finish as well as form, qualities that are produced in part by the work of maintenance - washing, cleaning, polishing, pressing, starching - to which they are subjected in their daily use. Textile objects (clothing and household textiles such as table and bed linen) are relatively soft and mutable and thus are particularly subject to wear and dependent on the constant refinishing of their surfaces. Textile objects are also closely connected to the human body and their constant maintenance is a practical and symbolic resistance to the signs of abjection that this close relationship brings.

Victoria Kelley will investigate a range of sources - photographs, advertising images, surviving garments and written texts - which foregraound materiality and its relationship to the social meanings of domestic labour. This process of analysis leads to conderation of the aesthetic as well as the social qualities of surface in everyday things.

CFP: Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference

CFP: Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference

Additional 6,000-word contributions are sought for an already formededited collection on contemporary feminist approaches to art historyand visual culture. The collection will be published by Cambridge Scholars Press within 2007.Art historians, practicing artists, and scholars in visual/cultural theory are invited to submit abstracts of approx. 500 words and a shortbiography to the editor Alexandra Kokoli ( a.kokoli@sussex.ac.uk ), by16th February 2007. Completed essays will be due in April 2007. Proposals on: performance art; art and/as craft; and feminist conceptualism are particularly encouraged, but all topics within the scope of the collection will be considered.

Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference addresses the on-going dialogue between feminism, art history and visual culture fromcontemporary scholarly perspectives. The essays in this volume contribute to the discussion around the shifting roles of feminist and gender-inflected theorisations of art and visual culture in criticism, history and practice since the 1970s. Over the past thirty years, the critical interventions of feminist art historians in the academy, the press and the art world have not only politicised and transformed thethemes, methods and conceptual tools of art history, but have also contributed to the emergence of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including notably that of visual culture. Although the impact of such fruitful transformations is indisputable, their exact contribution to contemporary scholarship and their changing function within the academy remains a matter for debate, not least because feminism itself has changed significantly since the Women's Liberation Movement. Side-stepping facile and vague characterisations such as 'post-feminist', Feminism Reframed offers a complex re-evaluation of different strands in feminist thought and practice around art and visual culture since the 1970s, highlighting continuities as well as points of disjunction. The essays of this volume explore the gaps and omissions of established methodologies and prevalent art historical narratives, while also recovering valuable tools and insights that maybe deployed in contemporary contexts and put to new uses. Feminism Reframed reviews and revises existing feminist art histories but also reasserts the need for continuous feminist interventions in the academy, the art world and beyond.

Dr. Alexandra M. Kokoli
Arts A,
University of Sussex,
Falmer,
Brighton
BN1 9QN, U.K.
a.kokoli@sussex.ac.uk

Magazine for PhD students

UK GRAD are publishing this tri-annual magazine for and by PhD students, covering generic issues for PGR students across all subjects.

Research Students Theory/Practice Seminar, Maidstone College

Research Students Theory/Practice Seminar, Maidstone College:
Semester 2: Work in Progress

Seminars take place on occasional Fridays: Seminar room 2, 11.00-1.00

Students take it in turns to present their work to the group. The session is in two related parts :

1. Theoretical approaches: the student presenting will select a short theoretical text - chapter, essay, article etc. which has some bearing on their work. This will be distributed a week beforehand. We will use this text as the focus for our initial discussion as a way of keeping up to date with a range of theoretical approaches to the discipline - other students might also wish to consider whether the text has any significance for their own project.

2. Research- in -progress. Students at an early stage of their research or those who are new to the group may wish to present something more discursive and informal outlining their research project; students at a later stage are asked to prepare a presentation around a more focussed aspect of their work and to either introduce a body of practice for group critique or select a short paper/ chapter and distribute it electronically beforehand so that we can use it as a basis for a more detailed discussion.

Proposed Timetable ( provisional and subject to amendment)

February 2nd Katherine Nolan ( Epsom)

March 2nd. Fil Ieropolous

March 23rd Eva Kapaldaki

April 20th Nigel Green

May 11th Jonathan Gilhooly

June 1st. Francesca Genovese ( to be confirmed)

June 15th Matt Gulliford (to be confirmed)

(other potential contributors at the moment include: Susan Ryland, John Torday, Isla Cunningham, Sophia Phoca. It may be possible to occasionally extend the seminar into a full day session and have two presentations in a day).

These are informal sessions and all research students, supervisors or interested staff are welcome to attend. Please contact Joanna Lowry, Research Co-ordinator Maidstone if you would like to join us or would like to offer a presentation: jlowry@ucreative.ac.uk

Fine Art and Architecture Research Seminars

Canterbury

All academic staff and postgraduate students welcome

Thursday 1 February: Seminar Room, 12 -1.30 pm.
Dr Victoria Kelley, Reader in Fashion Theory, Rochester.
‘Frayed Garments, Starched Linen: abjection and denial in clothing and domestic textiles’

Thursday 22 February: Seminar Room, 12.30 – 2pm.
Alison Marchant, Research Fellow in Photography and the Archive Centre, University of the Arts, London College of Communication.
‘Research, Site and Public Intervention’.

Thursday 15 March, Seminar Room, 12.30 -2pm
Joanna Lowry, Reader in Photography and the Moving Image
Maidstone
Will discuss her current research on painting and photography.

Library - Electronic Book System

The Library went live with the Ebrary Academic Complete Electronic Book package on Monday 8 January 2007.

This system provides online access to the full text of over 30,000 books.

The Academic Complete collection covers 8 main subject areas:
Business, Marketing and Economics
Humanities; Life and Physical Science
Medical Science; Computing and IT
Engineering and Technology
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Education
References and Maps

This system greatly enhances the Library collection and broadens its scope.

It is available both on and off campus, and is available 24 hours per day.

Please use the following link to access the system: http://site.ebrary.com/Athens

The search interface enables you to search by subject, title and author, or on any text within system.

Records for all books on the Ebrary system will also be incorporated into the main Library Catalogue.

You will need your Athens login details to access the Ebrary E-books collection. If you do not know your login details please ask at your home campus library.

Please contact your home campus Library if you have any questions about the Ebrary system.

After the Fine Art PhD: Post-Doctoral Options in Fine Art Research

Fine Art Doctoral Research Training

After the Fine Art PhD: Post-Doctoral Options in Fine Art Research

10.00am to 5.00pm Friday 8th December 2006
Lecture Theatre, Wimbledon College of Art
Merton Hall Road
London SW19 3QA


Speakers:

Katy Macleod (University of Plymouth)
Elizabeth Price (Stanley Picker Fellow, Kingston University)
Professor Olivier Richon (Royal College of Art)
Chris Smith (London Metropolitan University and Editor of Journal of Visual Arts Practice)


Please contact researchcentre@wimbledon.arts.ac.uk
to book your place.

Call for Papers: Fashioning the Modern Interior

Call for Papers

Fashioning the Modern Interior
The Dorich House Annual Conference #9.

Hosted by the Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, London, in association with the Research Department, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Thursday 17th May and Friday 18th May 2007

The modern interior has often been perceived as a stage-set for women and occasionally men adorned in fashionable dress – in effect as a space in which both individual identity and modernity could be expressed. Elsie de Wolfe, the American pioneer interior decorator held this view, and it was shared by many other aesthetic practitioners in the age of modernity, defined here as around 1870- to the present day, who made an easy transition from the design of the interior to that of fashionable dress and vice versa. Paul Poiret, for example, famously crossed both, while more recently Ralph Lauren has blurred the boundaries between the two areas, rooting his practice in the holistic concept of ‘lifestyle’. If fashionable dress and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, then the concept of ‘fashion’ itself arguably underpins the definitions of both the interior and dress viewed from this perspective. Both, as Charles Baudelaire, Thorsten Veblen, Georg Simmel and later Walter Benjamin understood, had the capacity to contain the sense of ‘belonging to the modern world’ and of expressing, in Bourdieu’s sense of the term, ‘distinction’. Currently, the popularity of countless television programmes dedicated to the subject is still an indication of the link between fashion and the interior today.

While, on one level, fashionability and modernity undoubtedly went hand in hand, in contrast architectural Modernism, the values of which were transferred directly to the Modernist interior and to Rational dress, explicitly rejected the idea of fashion, seeing it as a threat to the universal values it sought to embody.

This conference will seek to uncover and debate the numerous ways in which the interior and fashionable dress have intersected with each other in the period in question. Papers will address the following themes, among others:

Individuals who crossed the fashionable dress/interior divide
The meaning of ‘fashion’ in the context of modernity and its impact on dress and the interior
Tensions between fashion and anti-fashion in dress and the interior
The emergence of ‘lifestyle’ in this context
The influence of the mass media
Fashionable dress and identity in the context of the interior
Fashionable dress and the interior in the context of consumption

Conference convenors are Professor Penny Sparke, Professor Anne Massey, Dr. Trevor Keeble and Brenda Martin, Kingston University.

Abstracts of 300 words, with brief cv should be submitted to Brenda Martin, Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, Kingston Vale, London SW15 3RN . e-mail b.martin@kingston.ac.uk. by Friday 5th January 2007.
Conference website: www.kingston.ac.uk/design/mirc

Fine Art and Architecture Research Seminar

Fine Art and Architecture Research Seminar

Thursday 7 December
Seminar Room next to the Cragg Lecture Theatre, Canterbury
12.30 -2pm

Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard’s practice explores concepts of identity through genres of documentary, landscape and portraiture. She focuses on the narratives of those relegated to the ‘margins’ and excluded from constructions of ‘the centre’. Pollard’s work ultilises popular culture – postcards, photo albums and film. She uses quasi-scientific forms of enquiry including mapping, geology and anthropology and questions the part that photography has played in the truths these systems of representation have created.

Pollard’s recent work uses a range of lens-based media in exploring these issues through working with particular geographical landscapes and social sites. The work has been shown as mixed sculptural and photographic installations.

All staff and postgraduate students welcome.

Further information: Dr Judith Rugg, Reader in Fine Art Theory, Canterbury.
01227 817343

email: jrugg@ucreative.ac.uk