System Hold - Portfolio submission
- Submitting institution
-
University of the West of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 21017377
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- Emerald Publishing Limited
- Month
- November
- Year
- 2018
- URL
-
http://beta.uws.io/2020/03/01/ref-practice-based-research-portfolio-jo-collinson-scott-2/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
5
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- System Hold is a British Academy funded EP of four songs developed to accompany the criminological text book Pervasive Punishment (McNeill, 2018). It was included as an exclusive download as part of this text and later publicly released on Olive Grove Records (2019), receiving national radio play on the BBC network.
Pervasive Punishment was the first text of its kind to understand the extent of mass supervision as a global phenomenon and to analyse its effect. System Hold aims to address how the experience of these forms of punishment remains largely invisible and inaudible to such an extent that public and political debate about these practices is seriously undermined. With this in mind, the EP and its contextualising texts engage in crucial debates about ‘imaginary penalties’ and ‘sensory criminology’, by acting as the first exploration of its kind of what popular music can offer both academic and public understandings of criminal justice imposed forms of supervision.
The attendant research questions included:
• What is the ‘sound’ of mass supervision in the cultural imagination (and in future imaginings or re-imaginings)?
• How do we create musical material that generates ‘affective solidarity’ between those under supervision and a general audience?
The distinctive sound of the EP (produced by Adem Ilhan) draws on ‘glitch’ music as a genre that celebrates the sound of failure – embracing it as an integral creative process. It develops a crucial ‘audible’ form for questioning an institutional system (i.e. probation) that imposes harsh sanctions for any form of failure.
The research process embodied by the EP and its research underpinnings are documented in a chapter in Pervasive Punishment and discussed in Sensory Penalties (Herrity et al, 2021). The premiere performance of the songs is documented within the portfolio, with reflective comment from a former Chief Inspector of prisons.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -