Sarah Pedersen
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen
Hello from sunny Aberdeen! When the sun shines on all of the granite buildings in the centre of the city you begin to understand why it is also known as the “silver city”. Aberdeen’s granite stone was used to build the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and the Thames Embankment, as well as the second largest granite building in the world – Aberdeen’s Marischal College. In the sunlight it sparkles.
Hopefully all these granite facts will continue to inspire you with a determination to visit Aberdeen, even though we have had to postpone the MeCCSA conference scheduled for January 2021. We are grateful to our colleagues at Falmouth who have agreed to allow Robert Gordon University to host the MeCCSA conference in January 2022, with the Falmouth conference now happening in 2023.
The theme for the January 2022 conference will continue to be ‘Silenced Voices’ and we hope to send out a call for papers in March 2021. We are also grateful to our keynote speakers, Greg Philo, Anandi Ramamurthy, Karen Ross and Miklós Áron Sükösd, all of whom have agreed to participate in 2022.
As a taster for the 2022 conference we are working with MeCCSA to plan two webinars during January 2021, one on ‘Silenced Voices’ and one on ‘The impact of COVID-19 on the media’. We will be sending out a call for ten-minute discussions of work in progress on these themes in the autumn and hope that this will provide at least a ‘virtual’ visit to Aberdeen for you this winter.