*Parental Advisory* between 17 and 18 minutes there is some swearing, as we discuss interactions following an English Defence League demonstration in Leicester in 2010.

It’s been a while, and I have been spending so much time marking essays that I felt the need to do something different. So, the two things I’m doing are: first, walking the streets of Leicester as part of Beat the Streets; and second, talking with John Coster about documentary media, storytelling, and the role of the academic. I’ve known John for a decade, and seen him develop expertise around citizen journalism, social media and documentary practice.

So in this episode, we discuss the relationship between citizen journalism/media and both local communities and national media outlets. In particular, we discuss how this gets affected or changed in moments of extreme stress, in this case the EDL demonstration in Leicester in October 2010. We go on to discuss the purpose of John’s documentary media centre, and how it engages with issues that cross apparently binary divides, or at least divides that appear to be becoming more polarised.

Throughout the episode I was trying understand the relationship between processes of community or documentary media and academic practice, and also to the relationship between those processes and the idea of the University. In particular, I’m interested in the role of the University at moments of stress, and also the boundaries between the University and specific events and the places in which those events take place.