About this Event
- Registration and refreshments: 18:00
- Lecture: 18:30
- Wine reception: 19:30 - 20:00
From caring about the ‘ordinary’ to care justice for the creative industries.
This talk draws out some of the threads of my academic career in media studies and sociology over the last 25 years, through to my current work which argues for a principle of care justice. Focussing on how media enters into our social worlds - through the ways it talks to us, and the stories it tells - I have always cared about the seemingly banal and ‘ordinary’ for the insights they can give us into the politics of any particular moment. Through my work on television, I have considered the representations of ‘ordinary people’, audience interactions and emotional reactions, and their relationship to social formations – especially around the structures of class, race and gender. But culture is a circuit, involving not just media texts, forms and audiences, but also processes of production and regulation, and now at Aston, I am interrogating the way reality television is made. Whilst news of the poor treatment of participants abounds in the press, the UK regulator Ofcom insists on better ‘duties of care’ for participants. My funded research project, ReCARETV, interrogates the everyday working practices and interactions between policy makers, production crew and participants and is designed to have an impact upon conditions in the industry and to influence policy. Research increasingly shows how the creative industries are competitive, individualising, and extremely uneven; by calling for a principle of care justice, this talk ends with a pitch to make the creative industries a more caring and equal space for all.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Aston Business School, Aston Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
