Class and Contemporary UK Film and Television. Virtual Conference 7 July 22

School of Computing and Digital Media, London Metropolitan University.

Thursday 7th July 2022 Online

Platform here.

Contemporary film and TV in the UK appear to offer at least three interrelated problems for the lower socio-economic classes. There is imbalance, exploitation, and precarity in the industry; perennial problems around representation; and the inculcation of neoliberal ideology antithetical to social justice and equality. This free online conference is an opportunity to reflect upon and react to this scenario.

Joining details / website will be sent in advance of the conference.

For full details of abstacts, etc., please email j.baldwin@londonmet.ac.uk

Schedule:

9.00 Start – Formalities

9.15 Introduction - Zainab Khan

9.30 – 10.50 Precarity and Radicality

Jeremy Collins - Chair

Andrew Jarvis - The Violence of Finance in Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)

Ellie Power - Needed Modernising: Class conflict and the Time-image in Mark Jenkin’s Bait

Deirdre O'Neill - Inside film, Cultural Colonialization, and the Radical Potential of Film

10.50 – 11.00 Break

11.00 – 12.20 Sitcoms and Reality TV

John Keefe - Chair

Laura Minor - "Class, Comedy, and Caitlin/Caroline Moran’s Raised by Wolves: Women of the West Midlands Challenging ‘Poverty Porn’ on TV"

Mary Irwin - ‘Turkey Dinosaurs and Double Dinners’: This Country’s Everyday Lives in Rural Gloucestershire

Lila Messaoudi - Reality TV Shows (Love Island): Serial Consumption

12.20 – 12.30 Break

12.30. – 1.50 Gender and sexuality

Jenny Harding - Chair

Victoria Santamaría Ibor - “I’ve Been in a Prison all my Life”: Femininity and Social Abjection in Last Night in Soho

Hà Bao Ngan Dong - Consuming the Homocolonialist Ga(y)ze in Shamim Sarif’s I Can’t Think Straight

Martin Murray - How Do I Look? Sex, Gender, Class and the Gaze in Andrea Arnold’s Dog

1.50 – 2.30 Break

2.30 – 3.50 Taste, Heritage, and Imperial Nostalgia

Karen McNally - Chair

Tom May - Building paintings of class through taste: an analysis of production design in Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-1984)

Emily Hoffman - Bad Manors: Bergerac as Anti-Thatcher, Anti-Heritage Polemic

Daniel E Smith - The Imperial Wonder Boy: Benedict Cumberbatch, Imperial Masculinity, and British Film/TV Nostalgia

3.50 – 4.00 Break

4.00 – 5.20 British Social Realism

Mike Wayne - Chair

Katerina Flint-Nicol - It’s a question of class. Embodiment, fabrication, and performance, in British social realism.

Thirza Wakefield - Televisual seriality, and the dramatisation of working-class community in Shane Meadows’s works for television (2010–2019)

Temenuga D Trifonova - Social Realism and Class in UK Films

5.20 – 5.30 Break

5.30 – 6.00 The Acting Class (Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne) Film-makers question and answer session.

Katerina Flint-Nicol - Chair

6.00 – 6.10 Break

6.10 – 7.00 Keynote: Precarity, the Working Class and British Cinema – John Hill

Jon Baldwin - Chair

Advance Material:

Please watch The Acting Class (Inside Film 2017) in advance of the conference:

https://theactingclass.info/

Contributors will be invited to submit their work for consideration for a special edition of the Journal of Class and Culture.

https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-class-culture