Dr Cara Courage and Dr Nicola Headlam invite the submission of abstracts to the fifth Academic Archers annual conference on the subject of BBC Radio 4’s The Archers.
Academic Archers are an established experimental academic community where a cornucopia of insights are explored by Research Fellows (qualifications: committed listener) and professional academics (qualifications: university affiliation or independent scholar, broadly defined or specialist practitioner, and committed listener.) The conference is expected to be held over a February 2020 weekend, at a university venue close to London.
Academic Archers are methodologically heterodox and welcome emerging ideas in experimental format, conventional and bids for keynote speakers and submissions are invited from any academic discipline.
For this, our fifth annual conference, we seek presentations - with the broadest possible interpretation - on the conference themes of:
1 – Family dynamics: the psychology and business of family relations
For example:
· How family dramas, inheritance politics and reversals of fortune keep us all hooked.
· Family and Kinship in Borsetshire.
· How the case for family therapy/ grief counselling/couples counselling has become unanswerable.
· Family (business) planning – how not to do it?
· Macro and micro power; how national politics affect family politics
This conference strand will be curated into a 2021 edited collection for Emerald Academic Press.
2 - Fandom as a prism
For example:
· Using The Archers in teaching and/or research.
· The online tribes of the wider The Archers firmament.
· Salience in listener lives: why listeners form intimate relationships with The Archers characters.
· ‘I listen but I’m not a fan’ identity in The Archers fandom.
This conference strand will be curated into a 2020 edited collection for Emerald Academic Press.
The two strands and examples are of course not an exhaustive or exclusive listing and we seek papers on any and all aspects of life in Ambridge.
We welcome wildcards, flights of fancy and suggestions from leftfield. We have accepted papers as films, podcasts, posters, photo-essays, as well as the gamut of quantitative and qualitative approaches, archival and imaginative methods. These topic and format lists are meant to inspire you to think how your academic research, sector professional expertise or listener forensic knowledge of The Archers can illuminate and explain life of The Archers and Ambridge.
What you can expect as a presenter is the most committed and engaged audience of your life, listening avidly with curiosity, generosity and joyfulness and probing with the most penetrating of questions.
What we expect of presenters is to be an active member of the Academic Archers community of practice, contributing to media coverage, blogposts, podcasts and other promotional activity as appropriate.
If you are a fellow The Archers fan and/or academic please submit your abstract of 200 words with a short biography to cara@caracourage.net and headlams@gmail.com by 1st September 2019. Please indicate the type of presentation you are intending (Quick Pitch, 5 mins, plus Q+A; paper, 15 mins plus 5 mins Q+A; keynote, 45 mins to include Q+A.)
Programming will be determined by an Academic Archers peer review panel made up of our listener research fellows (who give the most detailed of feedback!!)
Decisions will be communicated to presenters by mid-October.