Mr Simon Stanton-Sharma
Biography | I am stream leader and lecturer at the University of Salford on the MA in Drama Production for TV and Film. I am an award-winning filmmaker and television director with over twenty years experience across scripted, commercials, entertainment and current affairs, mainly at the BBC where I acted as creative lead for BBC global output in the London 2012 Olympics. In 2017 I spent two years launching the BBC’s new Africa service in Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal and over the last 7 years was director of BBC 2’s Newsnight programme. |
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Research Interests | I’m currently working on a piece of videographic criticism about media representations of fatherhood, due to be completed in October 2023. I am also developing a research film and article focussing on female Uber drivers in Cape Town that offers critical commentary on the platform economy as enabled by globalisation and racial and gendered inequalities by exploring the precarity and threat of close, repeated and private proximity to strangers. My medium term goal for research springs out of a two pieces of work I have done in recent years. The first is a documentary film and subsequent article that looks to use literary and philosophical theory from Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to answer some of the key structural inefficiencies and inequalities highlighted in academic studies of television and film and the cultural industry at large. The work on this makes links between the ‘means of production’ and the output itself, seeing both elements as two sides of the same coin. Similarly, it was my experiences pre-Covid with award-winning documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis where we began designing and producing an experiment that sought to remove the editorial (authorial) process from live news output, (an idea pencilled as BBC Raw); that I became interested in how we seek to remove the bias, (unconscious, conscious and hegemonic) from the authorship process. My research looks at ways that it is possible to disrupt the ‘means of production’ that has potential to produce lasting impact on the editorial of both factual and fictional content. In other words, that having a lack of diversity within key editorial positions is not simply an issue for recruiters but more fundamentally an issue with the structural hierarchies of our broadcasters and production teams. |
Teaching and Learning | I teach across five L7 film and television modules and lead L7 modules that specialise in media theory and collaboration. I also lead a L5 module in creative commercial practice. |