Feeling the buzz in a Leicester department on the move

“There’s quite a dynamic feel about Leicester; it’s a quite buzzy university,” said Mark Banks, who will take up a chair in media and communication at the University of Leicester at the beginning of March. “There’s a sense of expansion and the feeling that the department’s going places.”

Dr Banks pointed out, however, that these were just some of the myriad reasons he had for taking the position, and that he hadn’t “necessarily been looking for another job”.

“This one seemed to be particularly attractive because it was offering a whole range of possibilities,” he said.

“I’ve been at The Open University for seven years as a reader, so naturally from time to time, I’d thought about what I might want to do next and this came at the right time, really. I was looking for a change and a new challenge.”

Dr Banks said the way in which the job had been framed seemed to offer the challenge of “helping to build a new project” for the department. He noted that the fact that Leicester’s department of media and communications had made some “exciting” researcher appointments in recent years showed it was trying to build on its good name while at the same time “take it in different directions”.

He continued: “I think the biggest [reason] they were interested in me was my areas of research interest: the cultural industries, cultural and creative industries policy (particularly around working practices), identities, subjectivity – all those things that arise in the context of the cultural and creative industries.

“They’ve got a little bit of that going on there, but I think they were looking for someone to come and help develop those areas of expertise.”

From this, Dr Banks said he got the sense that the department was “trying to build a new identity and develop a new set of research interests”.

Along with taking advantage of the opportunity to carry out research, Dr Banks added, he was “keen to get back into doing some face-to-face teaching”.

“Of course the OU is all distance-led,” he said. “The idea of getting back into a seminar room and teaching real-life students was quite appealing after seven years of not doing it.”

He was, he said, looking to “bed in” to his new role in the short term as well as develop links with people in his department and the wider university.

Beyond the academic side to the job, Dr Banks added that he was looking forward to getting into the “developmental and managerial aspects” of improving the department.

Despite “continually bad press” for media practice, media training and media studies degrees, he said media and communications departments had got “much stronger and more high-profile in recent years”.

He added: “Universities are starting to recognise that media and communications is quite a weighty, significant set of approaches.

“These departments are strong and people in them are doing important work…If you look at the intellectual discipline of [the field] it’s serious intellectual work. It’s much more established than it once was, and that’s a good thing.”

john.elmes@tsleducation.com