Peter Merrington
Biographic Data
| ID | 969754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Merrington |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Merrington |
| SIGNATURE | MERRINGTON P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5646-9460 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Discovering smart
In the late 2010s, publics in the UK encountered new kinds of street furniture: Strawberry Energy Smart benches in London and InLinkUK kiosks in Glasgow, with smart features such as phone charging, free Wi-Fi, free phone calls, information screens and environmental data. This article analyses how smart street furniture is socially constructed by relevant social groups, each with different interests, forms of power and meanings. Smartness became a…
Situated, Yet Silent
This article provides new evidence of the ways that smart cities materialize within specific sites and contexts through smart street furniture (SSF). Drawing on empirical data generated through mixed-method field research, the article examines the situated data relations that emerge in the context of the adoption of InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow and Strawberry Energy smart benches in London. The concept of “silences” is proposed to analyze ins…
Screen Choice
People watch films on televisions, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and cinema screens. As technologies, each of these screen types provide different opportunities to select particular films, and to choose when and where to watch them. This raises questions about how and why people choose particular screens and the viewing experiences they gain from doing so. To address these questions, we draw on 200 semi-structured interviews with film audience m…
Inequalities in Regional Film Exhibition
This article questions the variety of film exhibition in four English regions. While a regional and national frame is the focus of cultural policy in relation to film audience development in the UK, our analysis examines relational, localised and sub-regional film cultures in order to understand how differing levels of film exhibition influence people's sense of place. This is framed within a discussion of cultural inequality more generally. In t…
Viewing I, Daniel Blake in the English Regions
This article examines focus group responses to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016). Situated in four English regions (North East, North West, South West and Yorkshire and Humber), the focus groups were structured around a process of film elicitation that gathered a set of plural and richly textured responses to the film. Focusing on the participants’ understanding of realism within the film, the article complements existing textual analyses of rea…
Using mixed-methods, a data model and a computational ontology in film audience research
This paper discusses a methodology that seeks to address one of the challenges in working with a range of data in mixed-methods audience research, which is how to sort, order and categorise different data so that they can be systematically combined and interrogated. The methodology was developed as part of the “Beyond the Multiplex: audiences for specialised films in English regions” (BtM) project. This project required a mixed methods approach u…
Cape Dutch Tongaat
At the time of South African Union in 1910, lobby groups worked for the recognition of typically South African cultural heritage, which would shape identity for the new nation-state. Alongside the work of Afrikaner and colonial nationalists, the initiatives of English-speaking lobby groups, funded by mining magnates, were influenced by the concerns of the English National Trust, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the vernacular architecture reviva…
A Staggered Orientalism
Cecil Rhodes's vision of an all-British "Cape-to-Cairo" road,rail, and telegraph route is addressed by a reconstruction of the cultural matrix that appears to have held this concept before the public eye for nearly five decades. This cultural matrix constitutes a kind of colonial and imperial imaginary, which generated a particular founding myth for the colonial state of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and which also lent to foreign visitors,to…
C Louis Leipoldt's ‘valley trilogy’ and contested South African nationalisms in the early twentieth century
C Louis Leipoldt has long been received as a major figure within the Afrikaans literary canon. The recent posthumous publication of his English‐language Valley Trilogy (written in the 1920s, when the white Union of South Africa experienced contestation between Anglophone and Dutch or Afrikaans political lobbies) now reveals him as a dedicated liberal, squarely set against the isolationist policies of his Afrikaner peers. Leipoldt is a complex fig…
“State of the union”
A new performance genre, the “new pageantry”, was “invented” in England in 1905 and rapidly became recognised throughout England, North America and the British dominions as an effective means of celebrating centenaries and inaugural moments such as the establishment of Union in South Africa in 1910. The Quebec Tercentenary Festival adapted such a performance for the tercentenary celebrations in the summer of 1908; and this model was then employed…
Masques, Monuments and Masons
Masques, Monuments, and Masons: The 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa Peter Merrington (bio) Establishing the Field [Imperial] history is a fabric woven of self-reinforcing illusions. But above all, one illusion sustains it. This is the illusion of the theatre, and, more exactly, the unquestioned convention of the all-seeing spectator. —Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay1 In May 1910, South Africa celebrated the unification of two former…
Pageantry and primitivism
This article seeks to introduce the life and work of Dorothea Fairbridge, a long‐forgotten yet prolific Cape colonial author, as a worthwhile subject in South African literary history; it also seeks (while describing the activities of Fairbridge's cultural coterie) to sketch the field for further work in what is termed the ‘aesthetics of Union’ or Cape imperial aesthetics and iconography.1 For the sake of economy, several specific topics will be …
Pageantry and primitivism
This article seeks to introduce the life and work of Dorothea Fairbridge, a long‐forgotten yet prolific Cape colonial author, as a worthwhile subject in South African literary history; it also seeks (while describing the activities of Fairbridge's cultural coterie) to sketch the field for further work in what is termed the ‘aesthetics of Union’ or Cape imperial aesthetics and iconography.1 For the sake of economy, several specific topics will be …
A Staggered Orientalism
Cecil Rhodes's vision of an all-British "Cape-to-Cairo" road,rail, and telegraph route is addressed by a reconstruction of the cultural matrix that appears to have held this concept before the public eye for nearly five decades. This cultural matrix constitutes a kind of colonial and imperial imaginary, which generated a particular founding myth for the colonial state of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and which also lent to foreign visitors,to…
Using mixed-methods, a data model and a computational ontology in film audience research
This paper discusses a methodology that seeks to address one of the challenges in working with a range of data in mixed-methods audience research, which is how to sort, order and categorise different data so that they can be systematically combined and interrogated. The methodology was developed as part of the “Beyond the Multiplex: audiences for specialised films in English regions” (BtM) project. This project required a mixed methods approach u…
Masques, Monuments and Masons
Masques, Monuments, and Masons: The 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa Peter Merrington (bio) Establishing the Field [Imperial] history is a fabric woven of self-reinforcing illusions. But above all, one illusion sustains it. This is the illusion of the theatre, and, more exactly, the unquestioned convention of the all-seeing spectator. —Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay1 In May 1910, South Africa celebrated the unification of two former…
Pageantry and primitivism
This article seeks to introduce the life and work of Dorothea Fairbridge, a long‐forgotten yet prolific Cape colonial author, as a worthwhile subject in South African literary history; it also seeks (while describing the activities of Fairbridge's cultural coterie) to sketch the field for further work in what is termed the ‘aesthetics of Union’ or Cape imperial aesthetics and iconography.1 For the sake of economy, several specific topics will be …
Masques, Monuments and Masons
Masques, Monuments, and Masons: The 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa Peter Merrington (bio) Establishing the Field [Imperial] history is a fabric woven of self-reinforcing illusions. But above all, one illusion sustains it. This is the illusion of the theatre, and, more exactly, the unquestioned convention of the all-seeing spectator. —Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay1 In May 1910, South Africa celebrated the unification of two former…
“State of the union”
A new performance genre, the “new pageantry”, was “invented” in England in 1905 and rapidly became recognised throughout England, North America and the British dominions as an effective means of celebrating centenaries and inaugural moments such as the establishment of Union in South Africa in 1910. The Quebec Tercentenary Festival adapted such a performance for the tercentenary celebrations in the summer of 1908; and this model was then employed…
C Louis Leipoldt's ‘valley trilogy’ and contested South African nationalisms in the early twentieth century
C Louis Leipoldt has long been received as a major figure within the Afrikaans literary canon. The recent posthumous publication of his English‐language Valley Trilogy (written in the 1920s, when the white Union of South Africa experienced contestation between Anglophone and Dutch or Afrikaans political lobbies) now reveals him as a dedicated liberal, squarely set against the isolationist policies of his Afrikaner peers. Leipoldt is a complex fig…
A Staggered Orientalism
Cecil Rhodes's vision of an all-British "Cape-to-Cairo" road,rail, and telegraph route is addressed by a reconstruction of the cultural matrix that appears to have held this concept before the public eye for nearly five decades. This cultural matrix constitutes a kind of colonial and imperial imaginary, which generated a particular founding myth for the colonial state of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and which also lent to foreign visitors,to…
Cape Dutch Tongaat
At the time of South African Union in 1910, lobby groups worked for the recognition of typically South African cultural heritage, which would shape identity for the new nation-state. Alongside the work of Afrikaner and colonial nationalists, the initiatives of English-speaking lobby groups, funded by mining magnates, were influenced by the concerns of the English National Trust, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the vernacular architecture reviva…
Using mixed-methods, a data model and a computational ontology in film audience research
This paper discusses a methodology that seeks to address one of the challenges in working with a range of data in mixed-methods audience research, which is how to sort, order and categorise different data so that they can be systematically combined and interrogated. The methodology was developed as part of the “Beyond the Multiplex: audiences for specialised films in English regions” (BtM) project. This project required a mixed methods approach u…
Screen Choice
People watch films on televisions, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and cinema screens. As technologies, each of these screen types provide different opportunities to select particular films, and to choose when and where to watch them. This raises questions about how and why people choose particular screens and the viewing experiences they gain from doing so. To address these questions, we draw on 200 semi-structured interviews with film audience m…
Inequalities in Regional Film Exhibition
This article questions the variety of film exhibition in four English regions. While a regional and national frame is the focus of cultural policy in relation to film audience development in the UK, our analysis examines relational, localised and sub-regional film cultures in order to understand how differing levels of film exhibition influence people's sense of place. This is framed within a discussion of cultural inequality more generally. In t…
Viewing I, Daniel Blake in the English Regions
This article examines focus group responses to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016). Situated in four English regions (North East, North West, South West and Yorkshire and Humber), the focus groups were structured around a process of film elicitation that gathered a set of plural and richly textured responses to the film. Focusing on the participants’ understanding of realism within the film, the article complements existing textual analyses of rea…
Situated, Yet Silent
This article provides new evidence of the ways that smart cities materialize within specific sites and contexts through smart street furniture (SSF). Drawing on empirical data generated through mixed-method field research, the article examines the situated data relations that emerge in the context of the adoption of InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow and Strawberry Energy smart benches in London. The concept of “silences” is proposed to analyze ins…
Discovering smart
In the late 2010s, publics in the UK encountered new kinds of street furniture: Strawberry Energy Smart benches in London and InLinkUK kiosks in Glasgow, with smart features such as phone charging, free Wi-Fi, free phone calls, information screens and environmental data. This article analyses how smart street furniture is socially constructed by relevant social groups, each with different interests, forms of power and meanings. Smartness became a…
Art (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · History (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · South African History and Culture (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · African history and culture studies (4 works)