Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture: Summer News Roundup

The Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture is delighted to announce that in late August members of the Centre published Festivals and the City: The Contested Geographies of Urban Events. The Centre is particularly proud that this is free and open access and published with the University of Westminster Press.

Festivals and the City draws upon the Centre’s ongoing HERA-funded FESTSPACE project overseen by Professor Andrew Smith. Professor Smith and Professor Guy Osborn edited the collection, with Dr Bernadette Quinn of the Dublin Institute of Technology, and contributed three chapters including one based on their fieldwork in Finsbury Park entitled The Festivalisation of London’s Parks: The Friends’ Perspective, written with their colleague Dr Goran Vodicka. To celebrate, and to test some of these theories, one of the team went to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform in a park in East London.

A number of Centre members presented at the Law and Society Annual meeting in Lisbon, including Dr Anna Chronopoulou, Professor Steve Greenfield and Professor Guy Osborn. Dr Chronopoulou presented Parallel Mothers: Law-made Trauma Healing! Addressing Intra-race and Gender Invisibilities in Modern Spanish and Greek Cinema; Professor Greenfield presented The Portrayal of Retributive Justice on Screen; and Professor Osborn presented Scalping Event Tickets: Strategies for Regulating the Secondary Market.

Professor Pippa Catterall commented on the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership and the race to succeed him as leader of the Conservative Party on Radio 5 Live and BBC News. She also published a guide to the constitutional implications of the current situation as The Constitution and Boris Johnson’s Long Goodbye in the London School of Economics’ Politics and Policy Blog.

Moreover, the Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture has had a succession of successful funding bids for the Soho Poly Project. These include £40,000 from the Garfield Weston Foundation, £10,000 from Shaftesbury plc, and £50,000 from Westminster City Council, with news of this and Soho Poly’s projected 2023 opening being covered in the Evening Standard and The Stage.

Finally, there is a call for University of Westminster memorabilia. The Centre is involved in a drive for alumni, friends, and members of the public to check if they have any material that may be of interest to the University’s archivists and researchers.