The project team are currently working on a number of outputs from the research project (2017). These include special issues in the journals Feminist Media Histories and Women’s History Review, and research papers in Screen and the Journal of Oral History. Several papers have also been presented at national and international conferences. The project’s Principal Investigator Dr Melanie Bell is currently working on a book-length study of women in the British film industry which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020. This study, ‘Female Technicians: Women, Work and the British Film Industry, 1930-1990’, traces women’s work across the sectors of Features, Shorts, Cartoons and Commercials, and through the lens of a diverse number of craft roles including editor, animator, cinematographer, make-up artist and costume designer. It sheds new light on questions of women’s creative autonomy, their working practices and processes, and brings into view a more complex picture of women’s film work than has previously been recognised.
Forthcoming publications include 'Female Technicians: Women, Work and the British Film Industry, 1930-1990' in 2020
The Learning on Screen resource has played an invaluable role in researching and writing these new histories
The material held in the Learning on Screen resource has played an invaluable role in researching and writing these new histories. For example, the paper ‘Learning to Listen: Histories of Women’s Soundwork in the British Film Industry’, published in Screen, vol. 58, issue 4, pp. 437-457, 2017, made extensive use of trade union records to map women’s involvement in, and contribution to, soundwork in the British film industry.
The records helped us trace the patterns of women's recruitment as sound technicians
The records enabled the author Melanie Bell to draw a micro-history of women in this field, charting the peaks and troughs of women’s recruitment, the principal grades in which they were employed, and those from which they were excluded. This was supplemented with oral history testimony which both extended understanding of the gendered contours of the sound production workforce, and illustrated how some women managed to work in the industry under the radar of union administration. Through these materials a more expansive and nuanced history of women has come into view.
Publications from the international conference 'Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories III' (18-20 May 2016)
The organisers of the project’s conference Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories III (18-20 May 2016), Vicky Ball, and Laraine Porter are currently co-editing two volumes of conference proceedings for the journals Feminist Media Histories and Women’s History Review. The two special issues map on to the two inter-related themes of the conference: ‘Gendered Patterns of Discrimination in the Creative Industries’ (Feminist Media Histories, Autumn 2018) and ‘Structures of Feeling: Researching Women’s Media Histories’ (Women’s History Review, 2019).
‘Gendered Patterns of Discrimination in the Creative Industries’, Feminist Media Histories, Autumn 2018
‘Gendered Patterns of Discrimination in the Creative Industries’, brings together research that identifies the gender dynamics that shape and inform women’s experiences within particular creative industries both past and present and across differing national contexts of Australia, Europe and North America. Identifying the systemic patterns of gender discrimination that exists across television, film, radio and advertising at different points and in various geo-political climates provide contemporary scholars with evidence which they can affect change via historiography, pedagogy, advocacy as well as their own research and film-making practices.
‘Structures of Feeling: Researching Women’s Media Histories’, Women’s History Review, 2019
The second collection draws on Raymond Williams’ conceptualisation of ‘structures of feeling’ (1977) through which to engage with questions of historiography. The collection expands our knowledge of marginalised aspect of women’s film and television histories, such as amateur film-making, ‘Cinema for the Children’ and women’s welsh broadcasting histories as well as the methodological tools and concepts that can help shine a new light on both these marginalised and established approaches to women’s film and television histories.