[Commlist] Call for abstracts: British Popular Culture(s) Conference

We are delighted to announce the two academic keynotes for the first 
conference of British Popular Culture(s) will be

*Dr Joy White – *Dr White teaches at the University of Bedfordshire in 
social sciences and has taught and written on social mobility, urban 
marginality, youth violence, mental health/wellbeing and urban music. 
Her most recent book is /Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture 
During COVID /(Repeater, 2024).

*Dr Alice Pember – *Dr Pember teaches at the University of Warwick in 
film and television and has taught and written on the relationship 
between dance, music, film, and girlhood in the contemporary neoliberal 
landscape. Her forthcoming monograph is titled /The Dancing Girl in 
Contemporary Cinema/.

We are honoured that Dr White and Dr Pember will be our first academic 
keynotes and hope to announce our inaugural public keynote shortly, 
alongside some special plenary speakers. With this is mind and in the 
spirit of the season we are extending the call for papers deadline until 
*January 24^th , 2025.*

We look forward to receiving your abstracts, details below. Join us in 
Falmouth in late spring for the first annual British Popular Culture(s) 
Conference. It is shaping up to be really special.

*Call for abstracts: British Popular Culture(s) Conference.*

We are pleased to announce the launch of the British Popular Culture(s) 
Network, with an inaugural annual conference taking place at Falmouth 
University, between 5-7th June 2025.

The conference is open to researchers, academics, PhD students, 
practitioners, artists, curators, archivists and activists working in 
and across all areas of British popular culture and cognate disciplines. 
Britain has a vibrant heritage and history of popular culture, and a 
long tradition of cultural thinkers who have linked spheres 
of popular culture together but also approached them as separate 
entities. Fundamental to a vibrant, diverse, and 
sustainable popular culture is active creative participation and 
critical thinking to change, contest, and renew. This conference 
continues this spirit, accepting contributions from those involved in 
all aspects of critical appreciation, cultural scenes and practices, and 
utilising various methodologies and multi/trans disciplinary frameworks. 
The aim of the conference is to create a space for participants to come 
together to share, discuss, and foster ideas and practices which 
challenge assumptions, focus research and generate new thinking.

British popular culture continues to experience extraordinary 
ideological and political provocations, whilst facing commercial and 
socio-economic pressures. These pressures and challenges have been 
amplified by the impact of the Covid pandemic and fourteen years of a 
hostile Conservative government. The conference takes as its premise 
that popular culture is an evolving, dynamic social and creative process 
involving the self, community, and wider social structures which 
circulate and navigate capitalism. At this pivotal moment the conference 
and network will build a community of connections across academia and 
the cultural industries, creating a third sector to support and sustain 
future work and collaborations through conferences, events, and 
research, amongst other activities.

Taking place in Falmouth, Cornwall, a site of importance at the 
intersection of popular cultures and education, the conference will work 
in partnership with the local creative industry to highlight and discuss 
challenges facing regional creative and cultural economies. A hope of 
the event is that the highlighting of the richness, uniqueness, 
solidarity and precarity of regional popular cultures and how they 
entwine with wider discourses across the British Isles will be taken up 
in different locales for future iterations of the conference.

We invite individual abstracts for papers, performances, spoken word 
pieces, and short films (no longer than 20 minutes in length), as well 
as themed panels (no longer than 60 minutes in length). We also welcome 
ideas for further creative content such as exhibitions and workshops 
that can be integrated into the event through conversations with the 
conference team. Much of this event will take place 
in popular culture spaces in Falmouth such as multi-purpose arts venues, 
music and stand-up comedy venues, and cinemas, ensuring a representation 
in place of the discipline specific and interdisciplinary ideas being 
discussed.

Possible topics to include, but not limited to:

Advertising

Architecture

Art

Board Games and Pastimes

Comedy

Comics

Costume

Dance

Design

Fashion

Film

Illustration

Journalism

Literature

Media

Music

Performance

Poetry

Pubs

Sport

Television

Video Games

Festivals and Events

Politics and popular culture

Cultural policy

Popular culture and democracy

Popular culture and social justice

Popular culture and environmental crisis

Popular Culture and inequality

Pedagogies of Popular Culture

Popular Culture and the REF

Popular Culture in/and Education

Gender, class, sexuality, race

Alternative scenes and practices, DIY culture.

Popular culture industries

Emerging modes

Regional, local, and national cultural and creative economies

National popular culture in a global context

Space, place, tourism

Consumerism

Capitalism, Co-option and Commodification

Colonial and postcolonialism

Precarity and Sustainability

Activism

Celebrity

Celebrity Activism and Dissent

Archives, curation, programming

Cultural thinkers

Digitalisation and digital technologies

AI and technological impacts

The Popularisation of Folk Cultures

*NEW DEADLINE*

Please submit an abstract no longer than 300 words, five keywords and a 
short bio (including contact details) to, 
(_britishpopularculture /at/ falmouth.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(britishpopularculture /at/ falmouth.ac.uk)>_ by *January 24th 2025* .

Organising committee: Kat Flint-Nicol, Neil Fox, Simon Poole, Julie Ripley.


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