A very important date for your diary – 6th April 2019, the date of the fourth Academic Archers conference!
Next year, we’re heading to Sheffield and have a venue that offers accommodation – so a veritable Butlins for Archers fans with Nicola and I as your Red Coat entertainers (but without the bing-bong-bing tannoy announcements of Hi-di-Hi).
We’re talking to the venue at the moment about a Friday night arrival dinner and going through to a Sunday morning conference session, so pencil in the 5th and 7th for now too.
As soon as the format and prices are agreed, we’ll open the box office!
Call for Papers - The Archers in fact and fiction: Academic analyses of life in rural Borsetshire
Dr Cara Courage and Dr Nicola Headlam invite the submission of abstracts to the fourth Academic Archers conference, to be held on 6th April 2019 at University of Sheffield.
The one-day conference will feature a number of 15 minutes papers, as well as 5 minute Quick Pitches and posters, around the programme and issues contained therein, of BBC Radio4’s The Archers.
Submissions are invited from any academic discipline and subjects. Past papers have included:
- Rich Relatives or Ambridge Fairy? Patronage and expectation in Ambridge housing pathways
- Ambridgology and Counter-insurgency doctrine
- Heavy Petting: An examination of Metaphoric Relationships with Pets
- Cider with Grundy, On Orchards and the Commonplace in Ambridge
- ‘Seeming, seeming’: Othello, reputation, and Rob Titchener
- After the Flood: how can Ambridge residents develop resilience to future flooding?
- The Small Worlds of Ambridge: Power, Networks & Actants
This list is not meant to be proscriptive, exclusive or exhaustive, but is 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 in Ambridge and Borsetshire as well as national and global rural issues. The conference is intended to give fans of The Archers a platform to exercise their love of the programme and their subject area and submissions for consideration are welcomed from those within academia and professional sectors, those working and retired and those with specialist knowledge of The Archers.
If you are a fellow The Archers fan and/or academic please submit your abstract of 200 words with a short biography to both cara@caracourage.net and headlams@gmail.com by 18th May 2018, indicating if you are proposing a paper (15 minutes), Quick Pitch (5 minutes) or poster (print and digital). Please submit this as a Word attachment. Programming will be determined by an Academic Archers peer review panel and will be communicated by 4th July 2018.
Further information on Academic Archers can be found at www.academicarchers.net/ where you will also find links to films of the 2017 and 2018 conferences.