The Star Wars franchise is perhaps best known for its rather Manichean outlook on good and evil as expressed through the ‘Dark (evil) Side’ and ‘Light (good) Side’ of the Force (similar to 气, qi, or breath/spirit in Daoism) expressed through the Jedi, a type of warrior-monk.
The AHRC What’s On? Project Team: Beth Johnson, Dave O’Brien, Laura Minor, Anna Viola Sborgi What’s Class Got to Do With It? Rethinking TV from the Inside Out School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds 19th September 2025 Keynote : Philip Ralph, award-winning writer of screenplays for television and film and plays for stage and radio Closing plenary panel A One-Day
Call for Papers – Transnational Perspectives on Anime: A Symposium, in collaboration with Japan Foundation London Location: Lancaster University Date: July 4th 2025 Anime studies has become a significant area of investigation with exponential growth throughout the 21st century and more specifically the past decade.
“If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.” Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals Watching the recent Severance season 2 finale “Cold Harbour,” I became increasingly intrigued with the show’s explorations of selfhood and autonomy, whereby the ‘innies’ are […]
‘Do you come from the land Down Under? Where women glow and men plunder?’ ‘Down Under,’ Men at Work I feel like I have talked about this before (Beattie 2022;
The CHANSE ERA-NET project DIGISCREENS: “ Identities and democratic values on European digital screens: Distribution, reception, and representation ” is coming to an end in December 2025, and we would like to invite you to attend our final conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the 23rd and 24th of October . Confirmed keynotes: Cathrin Bengesser (Aarhus University) Ramon Lobato (Swinburne University of
I’m passionate about the written word but conversely, I’ve turned to digital media to encourage people to read.
It has been 20 years since the conference that inaugurated Critical Studies in Television. The twentieth anniversary gives us an opportunity to pause and consider where our subject is and might go. We will host a range of international scholars who will discuss television studies as a discipline.
NB: This is part of research that will be published in a special issue of Popular Culture Studies Journal focusing upon Star Trek: Enterprise which I am guest-editing (CFP open until 15 June). As a lifelong fan of the Star Trek franchise and a lifelong queer person (even if it took me a few decades to figure it out),[i] it is hard to overstate the joy I felt upon learning that Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount+
This talk explores the articulation of food and television through an analysis of the soap opera genre and their transmedia cookbooks. Whilst debates on food & literature and food & film have been researched extensively, the relationship of food & television remains relatively underexplored (Murray, 2012; Oren, 2003). This limited work has tended to focus on the cookery programme genre (Strange, 1998;
Last week, Kim Akass blogged about how the US press response to Adolescence (Netflix, 2025) made visible certain blind spots in a culture seemingly unable to identify that a particular kind of masculinity might be a problem. Akass read this very much through a prism of Trump, and I here want to continue this focus in order to add further consideration to the question of why a convicted felon was elected president by the American people.
