Academic Profile

Georgina Born

Research Interests

Georgina Born is Professorof Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. She trained in Anthropology at University College London and uses ethnography to study cultural production, particularly television, music and IT, and knowledge systems. Her books are Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage 2005), a study combining ethnography and history of the transformation of the BBC and of Britain’s public service broadcasting system in the past decade; Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California 1995), a critical study, again combining ethnography and cultural history, of the musical avant-garde and of music-science collaborations at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris; and Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (California 2000, edited with David Hesmondhalgh).

Her most recent ESRC-funded research, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society: A Critical Comparative Study’ (2004-6, with Andrew Barry, Geography, Oxford, and Marilyn Strathern, Social Anthropology, Cambridge), analyses the nature of interdisciplinary collaborations bridging the natural sciences and engineering, on the one hand, and the arts and social sciences, on the other. For a summary of this research see:

http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/technologies/projects/interdisciplinarity.html

Other ongoing research interests include a book in progress on cultural production, which brings into dialogue the anthropology and sociology of art, music and media; the normative dimensions of public service broadcasting, with a focus on how theories of democracy and difference can be brought to the analysis of the future of public media systems; how broadcast media are changing with digitization; music, mediation, technology and ontology, and the evolving modes of creativity attendant on music’s changing mediations; and music, sound, and the reconfiguration of public and private space – see the conference on this topic held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities in April 2008:

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/236/aprilmusic-sound.htm

Professor Born is also engaged in cultural policy and media policy work on the BBC, public service broadcasting and the cultural sector in Britain and Europe, and gave evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the future of the BBC. She is a member of the European Research Council’s Social Sciences and Humanities expert panels, and Chairs the Arts and Sciences Research Programme Committee of the Weiner Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (WWTF). She sits on the Advisory Board of the AHRC funded project, ‘Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service’, in the AHRC Diasporas, Migration and Identities Research Programme; and is a research leader for the Canadian SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative, ‘Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice’.

Professor Born is Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London, a Fellow of Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology, an International Fellow of the Australian Sociological Association, and was a Fellow (and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences) of Emmanuel College Cambridge (1998-2006) and Senior Research Fellow of King’s College Cambridge (1997-8). In 2008 Professor Born was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for her contributions to music research. She will hold the Bloch Professorship in Music at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011-12.

Brief CV

Research Interests

Research interests include: cultural production, cultural politics and cultural institutions (high cultural, museums and media organizations); post-Bourdieuian cultural theory; post-Adornian critical theory; anthropological theory; mediation theory; ethnography; sociology and anthropology of music and art; modernism and postmodernism in music and art; music and technology, music and digitization; theories of the avant-garde; intellectual property,  authorship, and creativity; media and cultural policy and media regulation; public service broadcasting; television – including documentary, drama, news and current affairs; genre; digitization and new media.  

Professor Born invites applications from PhD and MPhil students to do research in these areas.

Publications

A) Books

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC.
2004a. Hardback - London: Secker and Warburg. 564 pages. ISBN: 0 436 205629. 
2005a. Paperback - London: Vintage. 564 pages. ISBN: 0 099 428938.

2000a. Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley, CA. and London: University of California Press. (Edited with
D. Hesmondhalgh.)  360 pages. ISBN: 0 520 22084 6.

1995. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley, CA. and London: University of California Press. 390 pages.
ISBN: 0 520 20216 3.

B) Journal Articles

In process, ‘Irreducible heterogeneities and interdisciplines in formation, or the possibility of art-science’, Cultural Anthropology.

In process, 'The social and the aesthetic: For a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production', Cultural Sociology

2008a. 'Logics of interdisciplinarity', Economy and Society, v. 37, n. 1, February 2008.

2005b. ‘On musical mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity’, Twentieth Century Music, v. 2, n. 1, pp. 7-36. Cambridge: CUP. ISSN: 1478-5722.

2003b. ‘From Reithian ethic to managerial discourse: Accountability and audit at the BBC’, Javnost - The Public (special issue), v. 10, n. 3, pp. 63-80. Euricom. ISSN: 1318-3222.

2003c. ‘Strategy, positioning and projection in digital television: Channel Four and the commercialisation of public service broadcasting in the UK’, Media, Culture and Society
v. 25, n. 6, pp. 773-799. London: Sage. ISSN: 0163-4437.

2002a. ‘Reflexivity and ambivalence: Culture, creativity and government in the BBC’, Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research, special issue on Culture and Governance, v. 6, n. 1-2, pp. 65-90. Oxford: Blackwell. ISSN: 1362-5179. 

2001a. (With T. Prosser) ‘Culture, citizenship and consumerism: The BBC’s fair trading obligations and public service broadcasting’, The Modern Law Review, v. 64, n. 5, pp. 657-687 (September). Oxford: Blackwell. ISSN: 0026-7961.

2000b. ‘Inside television: Television research and the sociology of culture’, Screen v. 41, n. 4, pp. 68-96. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISSN: 0036-9543.

1999a. ‘Between audit and the market: Recent transformations of the BBC’. (In Catalan: ‘Entre l’eficacia interna I la competitivitat en al mercat: Transformacions recents de la BBC’), Treballs de Comunicacio n. 11, pp. 59-74, June. Barcelona: Societat Catalana de Comunicacio. ISSN: 1131-5687.

1999b. ‘The precarious materiality of software: Visual systems and social relations in digital technology’. (‘In Catalan: La materialitat precaria del programari: sistemes visuals I relacions socials en la tecnologia digital’), Revista d’ Etnologia de Catalunya n. 14, pp. 46-68, April. Barcelona: Departament de Cultura. ISSN: 1132-6581.

1998a. ‘Anthropology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, and the subject in culture’, American Anthropologist v. 100, n. 2, pp. 373-386. American Anthropological Association,
ISSN: 0002-7294.

1998b. ‘The public museum, museum photography, and the limits of reflexivity’, Journal of Material Culture v. 3, n. 2, pp. 223-254. London: Sage. ISSN: 1359-1835.

1997a. ‘Modernist discourse, psychic forms, and agency’, Cultural Anthropology, v.12, n. 4, pp. 480-501. Society for Cultural Anthropology / AAA. ISSN: 0886-7356.

1996. ‘(Im)materiality and sociality: The dynamics of intellectual property in a computer software research culture’, Social Anthropology, v. 4, n. 2, pp. 101-116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISSN: 0964-0282.

1993a. ‘Against negation, for a politics of cultural production: Adorno, aesthetics, the social’, Screen v. 34, n. 3, pp. 223-42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISSN: 0036-9543.

1992. ‘Women, music, politics, difference’, Women: A Cultural Review v. 3, n. 1, pp.  79-86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISSN: 0957-4042.

1987. ‘On modern music culture: shock, pop and synthesis’, New Formations n. 2, pp. 51-78. London: Routledge. ISSN: 0950-2376.

C) Chapters in Books

2007c. ‘The social and the aesthetic: Methodological principles in the study of cultural production’, in J. Alexander and I. Reed (eds.), Theory, Meaning, and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology. Boulder, Co.: Paradigm Publishers.

2007b. ‘From ethical organization to institutionalised reflexivity: Evolving accountabilities at the BBC’, in M. McDonald (ed.), Languages of Accountability. London and New York: Berghahn.

2007a. ‘Future-making: Corporate performativity and the temporal politics of markets’, in D. Held and H. Moore (eds.), Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation. London: Oneworld.

2006b. ‘Digitising democracy’, in (eds.) J. Lloyd and J. Seaton, What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better, pp. 102-23. Special book issue of Political Quarterly. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN: 1 4051 3693 6.

2006c. ‘Public service communications in the digital era: Communicative democracy, pluralism, and the politics of presence’, in F. Colombo and N. Vittadini (eds.), Digitizing Television: Theoretical Issues and Comparative Studies Across Europe, pp. 37-68. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. ISBN: 88 343 1259 7.

2004b. ‘Against negation, for a politics of cultural production: Adorno, aesthetics, the social’, in G. Delanty (ed.), Theodor W. Adorno (4 volume set), Volume Three: Cultural Theory and the Postmodern Challenge, pp. 95-117. London: Sage. ISBN: 0 761 943641.

2004c. ‘On modern music culture: shock, pop and synthesis’, in S. Frith (ed.), Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (Volume 1 of 4), pp. 293-323. London: Routledge. ISBN: 0 415 299055.

2003d. ‘Public service broadcasting and digital television in the UK: The BBC, Channel 4 and the politics of positioning’, in G. Lowe and T. Hujanen (eds.), Broadcasting and Covergence: New Articulations of the Public Remit, pp. 205-221. Goteborg: Nordicom. ISBN 91 89471 180.

2002b. ‘(Im)materiality and sociality: The dynamics of intellectual property in a computer software research culture’, in M. Mundy (ed.), Law and Anthropology: International Library of Essays in Law and Legal Theory (2nd Series), pp. 547-562. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN: 07546 2082 4.

2000c. (with D. Hesmondhalgh) ‘Introduction: On difference, representation and appropriation in music’, in Born and Hesmondhalgh (eds). Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, pp. 1-58. Berkeley, CA. and London: University of California Press. ISBN: 0 520 22084 6.

1997b. ‘Computer software as a medium: Textuality, orality and sociality in an Artificial Intelligence research culture’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds.) Rethinking Visual Anthropology, pp.139-169. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN: 0300 07854 4.

1997c. ‘IRCAM: Legitimation, mythologies and indisciplines in contemporary music’, in S. M. Sorensen (ed.) In the Plural: Institutions, Pluralism and Critical Self-Awareness in Contemporary Music, p. 7-15. Copenhagen: International Society for Contemporary Music. ISBN: 87 986612 0 5.

1993b. ‘Understanding music as culture: Contributions from popular music studies to a social semiotics of music’, in R. Pozzi (ed.) Tendenze e Metodi nella Ricerca Musicologica, pp. 211-228. Florence, Italy: Olschki. ISBN: 88 222 4327 7.

1993c. ‘Afterword: Music policy, aesthetic and social difference’, in T. Bennett et al. (eds.) Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, pp. 266-292. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN: 0 415 06369 8 / 06368 X.

1991. ‘Music, modernism and signification’, in A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (eds.) Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics, pp.157-78. London: ICA. ISBN: 0905263 189.

D) Online Publications

Forthcoming 2008. The social and the aesthetic: Methodological principles in the study of cultural production, in J. Alexander and I. Reed (eds.), Theory, Meaning, and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology. Boulder, Co.: Paradigm Publishers.

2008a. 'Logics of interdisciplinarity', Economy and Society, v. 37, n. 1, February 2008.

2008b. Trying to intervene: British media research and the framing of policy debate. International Journal of Communication, Features section, v. 2, 2008.

2007d. ‘The Proms and Radio 3: Beyond musical and intellectual centrism, narrowness and caution’. Plenary paper for the international conference, The Proms and British Musical Life, British Library, London, April (4,000 words).

2006d. ‘Keep broadcasting public’. Plenary paper for the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom Annual Conference, London, April (2,000 words).

2006. Digitising democracy, in (eds.) J. Lloyd and J. Seaton, What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better, pp. 102-23. Special book issue of Political Quarterly. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN: 1 4051 3693 6.

2005. On musical mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity. Twentieth Century Music, v. 2, n. 1, pp. 7-36. Cambridge: CUP. ISSN: 1478-5722.

2003a. Uncertain Futures: Public Service Television and the Transition to Digital - A Comparative Analysis of the Digital Television Strategies of the BBC and Channel Four.Media@LSE Working Papers. (40 pages). ISBN: 1474-1938, online 1474-1946:

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