Disclaimer I will speak from my own experience and from what I know the most — the case of being a (European) cisgender woman in academia . I don’t claim to represent or fully understand the struggles of transgender women or other genders in this article. Everything: The Weight on Your Shoulders of Multiple Expectations An Invisible Pressure Women in academia constantly feel an

Archival work (photo courtesy of Helen Wheatley) People following the last few weeks of the Critical Studies in Television blog will have seen my brilliant colleagues discussing the essential work that they have been able to do thanks to the previous researcher-led access arrangements at the BBC Written Archives.

Open Science (OS) is a movement that aims to bring about a change to the academic publishing system. Yet, despite being around for over 30 years, it has had relatively limited success. Traditional publishers still dominate the landscape, article processing charges have made publishing less equitable and the whole system is straining under the pressure of increased numbers of papers and a reduced reviewer pool.

Margery Wace in 1935. With kind permission of Cecilia Johnson. My first visit to the BBC’s Written Archives Centre was in 2002. I was working as a producer on Woman’s Hour and had applied for a three-month attachment to what was then the Diversity Centre, to research and write a history of women at the BBC.

Those of you that have been reading CSTonline for a while will know that I have been in the USA for the past 6 years.  I was employed (as an American TV scholar) to write a Master’s Programme in TV Studies.

Around the world, sports journalism is dominated by men. In 2018, Sky Sports in Britain recognized that: ‘At recent press conferences for the leading football clubs in the Premier League, Championship and Scottish Premiership we counted 310 reporters covering 25 clubs. Nearly 300 were men;

When I first started my PhD in France, I couldn’t help but address my PI with the formal “you” in french (“ vous ”), instead of the informal “you” (“ tu ”). She was very quick to tell me to use the informal form. It took some getting used to, but I stuck to it.

In August 2022, I secured a slot at the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham to look at the archives for Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan (BBC1, 1968-1982). This was a groundbreaking programme produced for the British Asian diaspora.

We’ve all peeked at that “Received, Revised, Accepted” section of a paper and instantly regretted it. Those dates often read less like a timeline and more like an archaeological record. And that, kids, is why one should NEVER ask a PhD student about the timings of their PhD. From all variables that define the fate of a PhD, one of the harder ones to control is indeed… the peer reviewing process (wow, on a blog that writes about peer reviewing.

In a book chapter I recently had published (Beattie 2025) I discuss how seminal British sitcom Desmond’s (1989-1994, Channel 4) illustrates how barbershops function as both community anchors and as sites of cultural education for Black communities.

… gotcha! You clicked because the title sounded extraordinary, revolutionary, amazing — didn’t it? And for a while, I found myself reacting the same way you just did. Then, spending a good hour reading an article, only to realize there was no real solution inside. Just less bold conclusions, weak predictions even. Some articles are like that — they promise a lot in the title but deliver very little.