Crossroads 2022 spotlight panels
Click on the titles of the spotlight panels to read the abstracts.
Day 1 (November 17th)
9.45 Spotlight Panel 1 : Emotional Celebrity – Sean Redmond (Deakin University), Deborah Jermyn (University of Roehampton), Jo Littler (City, University of London), Helen Wood (University of Lancaster)
17.15 Spotlight Panel 2 : Postcolonial Intimacies Reconsidered – Helene Strauss (University of the Free State), Kimberly Bain (University of British Columbia), Sarah Brophy (McMaster University), Danielle Wong (University of British Columbia)
Day 2 (November 18th)
8.00 Spotlight Panel 3 : Postdigital cultures – Janneke Adema (Coventry University), Rolien Hoyng (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Daisy Tam (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Emotional Celebrity
November 17th
9.45 – 11.15 GMT
Chair: Sean Redmond (Deakin University)
Presenters: Deborah Jermyn (University of Roehampton), Jo Littler (City, University of London), Helen Wood (University of Lancaster)
The centrality of emotion and affect to the production and consumption of stars and celebrities has become of central concern to cultural study scholars, producing productive discussions in the way it is understood. On the one hand, the emotionality of fame can be argued to allow intense and activist relationships to emerge, challenging and resisting dominant ideology as it does so. On the other, emotional celebrity can be said to be in the service of dominant ideology, an affective mechanism to help sell products, goods, services, lifestyles, and dreams. The question, then, that drives the papers on this panel is, what ‘good’ if any does emotional celebrity serve culture and society?
Each paper addresses a current or ‘live’ issue, bringing emotional celebrity to the contemporality of everyday life. Deborah Jermyn’s paper addresses the rise of the ‘menopause memoir’ and its relationship to affective, confessional discourse. Jo Littler’s paper draws together disaster capitalism and environmental breakdown to examine the affective and materialist role that emotional celebrity plays in their representations. Helen Wood examines the mental health crisis in relation to reality celebrity and the care narrative that it is entangled with.
The panel brings together three of the most significant cultural studies scholars of the last 20 years, their work and ideas having shaped the way that representation, power and identity has been better understood.
Panel Chair bio: Sean Redmond, Professor of Film and Television at Deakin University, Australia. His publications include Celebrity (2018), A Companion to Celebrity (2015, with David P. Marshall), and Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (with Su Holmes, 2012). He is the founding editor of Celebrity Studies.
Paper Abstracts
‘[It] felt like being sucked into a black hole’: Scrutinising the rise of the celebrity ‘menopause memoir’
Deborah Jermyn, Reader in Film and Television, University of Roehampton UK
In recent years, the UK has witnessed an unprecedented period of public cultural conversation around a newly inflected era of menopause consciousness and comprehension, constituting what I have called ‘the menopausal turn’. The shift in media discourse has been nowhere more apparent than in the preparedness of numerous high-profile women celebrities ready and willing to share their stories and lend their names to ‘confessional’ menopausal disclosures of one kind or another, in what I term ‘menopause memoirs’. A notable band of established women personalities, journalists and presenters, including such figures as Davina McCall, Mariella Frostrup, and Meg Mathews, have emerged as recognised advocates for better menopause awareness and care, drawing candidly on their own experiences to give testimony to the consequences of menopause ignorance and misinformation.
In all these instances, the viability of the star’s campaigning pivots on their willingness to impart personal and sometimes distressing details of their own menopause. Indeed, for a particular order of women celebrity, menopause advocacy has become a significant aspect of contemporary celebrity branding. This paper examines the consequences of the upsurge of menopause activism in UK celebrity culture being shaped, as it has, by a delimited vision of who the menopause impacts. How is understanding of the menopause being envisioned and bolstered through this prism as primarily the terrain of White, cis-gendered, middle-class affluence – even aspiration at times – constituting the newest project of the self to be undertaken in the neoliberal landscape, as imagined through celebrity discourse?
Bio: Deborah Jermyn is Reader in Film & Television at the University of Roehampton, London, where she is a Deputy Research Degrees Convenor. She has written widely on celebrity and is author and editor of 11 books including (with Su Holmes) Women, Celebrity & Cultures of Ageing: Freeze Frame (2015), while her latest project examines the impetuses and ramifications surrounding the emergence of the ‘menopausal turn’ in contemporary media culture.
Move me: celebrity feeling and transport infrastructure in an age of disaster capitalism and environmental breakdown
Jo Littler, Professor in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London, UK
In July 2022, whilst Californian wildfires raged, Kylie Jenner posted a photo of herself on Instagram with boyfriend Travis Scott next to their two private jets and the caption ‘Wanna take mine or yours?’. On Twitter, @CelebJets publicised private celebrity jet journeys in real time. As outrage against celebrity ‘climate criminals’ grew, Friends of the Earth published the top 10 celebrity private jet polluters (topped by Taylor Swift).
The backlash to celebrity transport excess is a long time in the making. Private jets are perhaps only topped by Elon Musk’s space ventures as the ultimate carbon-spewing mode of hyper-individualised celebrity transport. Meanwhile, in the UK, 2022 saw the sudden rise to celebrity status of RMT union leader Mick Lynch as UK railworkers launched a series of strikes against decreasing pay and increasingly unsafe conditions. Lynch laid waste to the loaded anti-strike prejudices of primetime mainstream media interviewers with his witty and deft responses, making it clear that UK transport policy only benefitted the rich — whilst Spain made rail transport free, and Germany slashed fares, costs for UK transport users and workers were soaring.
This paper asks what we can understand about our current social and cultural infrastructure in an age of disaster capitalism and environmental breakdown by considering celebrity’s relationship to transportation. It suggests these new articulations can be read both in terms of the contradictions and polarisations they incarnate, and their progressive potential; and in the process, it explores their capacities to ‘move’ us, both materially and emotionally.
Bio: Jo Littler is Professor in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London, UK. Her books include Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (Routledge, 2018) and with The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto (Verso, 2020).
Mental health, emotional capital and reality celebrity – is there a capacity to care?
Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK
This paper tracks some of the permutations of narratives of mental health in celebrity publicity. From older narratives of the ‘crash and burn girl’ (Projansky 2014), largely associated with young female celebrities seen to be failing in their celebrity status, to more contemporary high status celebrity associations with mental health advocacy. As mental health conversations have become more central to public debate, so too have celebrities like Demi Lovato been able to re-align mental health recovery with ideological narratives of self-care and self-work – positioning themselves as empowering others (Fransson 2020). This paper attempts to think through the ways in which conversations about mental health are now operating with a particular currency across celebrity media and in particular in relation to social media trolling and duties of care in examples from reality celebrity. How are these extended conversations around mental health, which are often responded to with trending hashtag instructions to ‘be kind’, incorporated into the same realms of emotional capital which may be laboured for and traded? How can these, often individualising, rhetorics be compatible with the narratives of care that also accompany them? How should we understand this heightened attention to mental illness as drawing attention to/or deflecting from the most common reading that it is advanced capitalism itself which is fuelling a decline in mental health?
References
Projansky, Sarah. Spectacular Girls. New York: NYU Press, 2014.
Franssen, G “The Celebritization of Self-care: The Celebrity Health Narrative of Demi Lovato and the Sickscape of Mental Illness.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 89-111.
Bio: Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lancaster. She has published widely on gender, television and class and is editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Postcolonial Intimacies Reconsidered
November 17th
17.15 – 18.45 GMT
Chair: Helene Strauss (University of the Free State)
Presenters: Kimberly Bain (University of British Columbia), Sarah Brophy (McMaster University), Danielle Wong (University of British Columbia)
This panel reconsiders a 2013 Special Issue of the journal Interventions on the topic of ‘Postcolonial Intimacies’ by taking into account some of the ways in which recent global shifts have complicated the experience and mediation of intimacy across a range of sites. As researchers with a long-standing interest in “the experiential and affective textures whereby political, legal and social regimes of recognition come to be lodged in, and potentially dislodged from, the body” (Antwi et al. 6), we attend in this panel to emergent forms of embodied political subjectivity, popular protest, and aesthetic activism engendered, for instance, by contemporary state violence and attendant forms of digital, algorithmic, extractive, and racial capitalism. Drawing on some of the latest work in African diaspora and Asian North American studies, crip theory, and new media studies, the panel maps modes of anti-racist, feminist, decolonising and queer critique responsive to our political present. To this end, we explore scenes of everyday intimacy through critical frames that include ‘Black unrest’ (Bain), ‘pandemic temporalities’ (Brophy), and ‘algorithmic protest’ (Wong).
Panel Chair bio: Helene Strauss is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research spans topics such as Southern African literature and audio-visual culture; feminist and queer aesthetic activisms; protest cultures; materialisms old and new; mining; the climate crisis; and documentary film. Her recent major publications include Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge, 2017, co-edited by Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola). She also co-edited, with Phanuel Antwi, Sarah Brophy, and Y-Dang Troeung, the special issue of Interventions on “Postcolonial Intimacies,” that this panel revisits. She is the Vice-Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies and serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Cultural Studies, English in Africa, and Journal of Literary Studies. Her current research includes a long-term collaborative international project on the decolonial work of reckoning, repairing, and reworlding called for by histories of extractive racial capitalism unfolding in the planetary climate crisis.
Paper Abstracts
Black Unrest
Kimberly Bain, University of British Columbia, Canada
What forms of dispersed intimacy emerge at sites of Black unrest? Black unrest reflects the histories and practices of Black rage and protest in the face of an anti-Black world; it also illumines and attends to the impossibility of Black persons being at and finding rest. Sitting with and in the wake of the murder of Breonna Taylor, I sojourn with the forms Black unrest that emerged at her memorial in Washington D.C. As I argue, the memorial not only joined attendees in song and dance—everyone swaying, singing, hugging, sweating, bouncing along to the sounds of Mary J. Blige—but produced a kind of sensorial schema capable of collecting, gathering, and holding dispersed Black being. Placing this social text alongside the work of visual artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman and his 2017 piece, “Dance Card, or How to Say Anger When You Lose Control,” I explore Black unrest as a making and doing rooted in socialities and relationalities beyond the ruinous now.
Bio: Kimberly Bain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia—Vancouver. Her most pressing and urgent concerns have consolidated around questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora. She is currently at work on two scholarly monographs. The first, entitled On Black Breath, traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. Her second book, Dirt: Soil and Other Dark Matter, turns to dirt for understanding how Blackness has shaped global considerations of the Anthropocene and refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism.
“Closer to each other than we’ve ever been”: Intimate Mediations and Pandemic Temporalities in/of the April 2020 Rapid-Response Essay
Sarah Brophy, McMaster University, Canada
This paper considers the exigencies, affects, and rhetorics of essays created and circulated amid (and against) what’s been critically assessed as the pandemic’s intensification of digital and racial capitalism, the so-called “digital rush” (Chan 2020). With attention to April 2020 publications by scholars, creative writers, and activists including Saidiya Hartman, Sabrina Orah Mark, Arundhati Roy, and Alice Wong, I will draw out the legacies of the widely circulated short personal essays published online in response to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Urgent but not ephemeral, such rapid-response pieces constitute an enduring, distributed online archive that remains resonant as we move into the longer temporal arc of “post-pandemic” futures. Situated in multiple, carefully contextualized intimate, national, global, and planetary registers and demanding to be interpreted through intersectional and crip lenses, the April 2020 essays that I examine dwell critically on the coronavirus—its fearsomeness, and the immediate and deepening inequities of its impacts—in ways that interrupt resurgent ‘outbreak’ and eugenicist discourses. As I will show, quickly composed short-form essays mobilize(d) experiential, scholarly, creative knowledges to: address problems of scale and incommensurability; craft an address to their readers that disrupts dominant logics (discriminatory triage protocols, state abandonment, everyday despair); and share resources (imaginative, digital, material) for living and caring for one another in Covid times. In constellating a set of resistive April 2020 rapid-response essays and making linkages between them without conflating their locations, concerns, or tactics, I aim to reflect on the salience of “postcolonial intimacies” (Antwi et. al. 2013) as a framework for reckoning with multiple “pandemic temporalities” (Butler and Chen 2021; Chan 2020) and heeding the ethical-political calls issued by our April 2020 contemporaries.
Bio: Sarah Brophy is a Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, located on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, and within the lands protected by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant. She is the author of Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning (U of Toronto P, 2004), co-editor with Janice Hladki of Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography (U of Toronto P, 2014), and co-editor with Phanuel Antwi, Helene Strauss, and Y-Dang Troeung of “Postcolonial Intimacies,” a special issue of Interventions (2013). In the last few years, with support from SSHRC, she has been examining the meeting points of visual self-portraiture, exhibition spaces, mediated intimacies, digital labor, disability, race, gender, and activism, and developing new strands of research inquiry and pedagogy in narratives of health and digital lives. Recent publications appear in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2018), Cultural Critique (2019), Feminist Media Studies (2020, with Adan Jerreat-Poole), and Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies—Technology—Power (forthcoming, with Emily Goodwin).
Algorithmic Protest: Memetic Form and Affect on TikTok
Danielle Wong, University of British Columbia, Canada
Described by North American news media as an app that is “more machine than man,” TikTok is often differentiated from American-owned social media platforms for its transparently algorithmic interface and its foregrounding of machine learning in the app experience. This talk analyzes techno-Orientalist discourses about the Chinese-owned app, and how TikTok users have deployed the video-sharing platform to protest China’s Uighur concentration camps and anti-Black state violence in North America. I suggest that TikTok engenders modes of algorithmic protest—a genre of political performance and circulation that involves memetic forms and affects that emerge within, and potentially expose the violence of, surveillant capture systems.
Bio: Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, where she also teaches in the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersections of race, empire, and technology. Her current book project, Racial Virtuality: The New Media Life of Asianness, theorizes historical and contemporary relationships between virtuality and Asian North American racialization by examining everyday social media.
Postdigital cultures
November 18th
08.00 – 09.30 GMT
Chair: Janneke Adema (Coventry University)
Presenters: Janneke Adema (Coventry University), Rolien Hoyng (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Daisy Tam (Hong Kong Baptist University)
The postdigital, as concept and condition, challenges binary distinctions between digital/analogue, old/new media, and technology/life: now that digital technologies have permeated all aspects of (cultural) life, we can no longer perceive the digital as a separate category of analysis. However, the pervasiveness of the digital does not amount to the subsumption of the nondigital through total datafication and (algorithmic) control or the stability of digital form. Oriented on the inherent entanglement of technology and material practices, this session explores the relevance of the postdigital for our understanding of culture and Cultural Studies. It examines how the post-digital can be useful to think through issues of temporality and binary thinking in publishing, liminality in infrastructural operation and ecological management, and crowdsourced technology in relation to urban food security.
Paper Abstracts
Post-Publishing. Between the Digital and the Human
Janneke Adema, Coventry University, UK
Taking as its starting point the ‘post’ prefix and the question of temporality this imposes, this paper explores how ‘post-publishing’ practices (incorporating both strategies of postdigital and posthumanities publishing) challenge established binaries in knowledge production (i.e. between print/digital). Post here doesn’t denote an ‘after’ or a distancing—it isn’t opposed to what precedes it—but deconstructs what we take for granted in Cultural Studies publishing in a continuous manner as a form of radical self-critique. Through an exploration of selected post-publishing projects, this paper outlines how Cultural Studies can incorporate post-publishing strategies to explore more just futures for research and communication.
Bio: Dr Janneke Adema (she/her) is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of (book) publishing and digital culture. She is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University). In her research she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, post-publishing, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, ScholarLed, and Post Office Press (POP), and the Research England and Arcadia funded Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, on which she is Co-PI. Her monograph Living Books. Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021) is openly available. You can follow her research on openreflections.wordpress.com.
Liminality and the Post-Digital
Rolien Hoyng, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Digital infrastructural networks manifest instances of both nondigital and postdigital liminality, which I unpack by drawing on Simondon’s notion of transduction. Transduction reflects two senses of liminality: i) as edge of infrastructural operation and ii) as transformative and excessive emergence that exceeds the current material and socio-technical formations, as we think we know them. The first sense underscores liminal difference that resides in the exclusions and interstices of digital infrastructural networks, whereas the second sense considers it as the excess borne from infrastructural operation. I illustrate the critical purchase of these two senses of postdigital liminality by discussing how digital infrastructures are applied in the context of ecological crisis. My examples intersect datafication, more-than-human materiality, and ecological management.
Bio: Rolien Hoyng is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research addresses digital infrastructures and data-centric technologies in particular contexts of practice, such as urban politics and dissent as well as ecological governance and electronic waste. Her research has covered multiple sites, including Turkey, Hong Kong, and Europe. Recent publications encompass a special issue “Digital infrastructure, liminality and world-making via Asia” (International Journal of Communication) and an edited book Critiquing Communication innovation: New media in a multipolar world (with G.L.P Chong, MSU Press).
Postdigital Collective
Daisy Tam, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Digitally enabled participatory culture has been simultaneously celebrated and criticised for new ways of mobilising the crowd. Exploring alternative perspectives through the case study of Breadline – a web application that crowdsources logistics for the purpose of food rescue developed as part of my research on urban food security, I will argue that these emergent practices enable a collective that is transient, temporal but nevertheless purposeful. Foregrounding discussions of connectivity and amplification in real time, I will demonstrate how collaboration in this case relies on both digital and tacit knowledge which enables a form of collective intelligent action that extends the power of the crowd.
Bio: Dr. Tam is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Informed by her Cultural Studies training, her research in urban food systems and critical cultural analysis on food waste is a theoretical and technical endeavour underpinned by an interest in ethical practices of care. She collaborates closely with community organisations and works in an interdisciplinary and impact-driven manner. She is founder of HKFoodWorks and Breadline – HK’s first public digital platform for food rescue.