Welcome to the Birmingham Centre for Cultural & Media Research Group Seminar.

This month we welcome Professor Feona Attwood, Media Department at Middlesex University, UK and Professor Clarissa Smith, Associate Director of CRMCS, Sunderland University

Feona will be presenting: Sexualization and Media Studies

Public debates about ‘the sexualization of culture’, along with some academic accounts - suggest a shifting relationship between pornography and popular culture in which porn is seen to be spilling out of the pornosphere into other more mainstream cultural forms. How useful is this as a way of thinking about the relationship between contemporary porn and popular culture? What can academics in Media and Cultural Studies contribute to the debate?

Clarissa will present: Porn Studies and Media Attention

In the context of the upcoming REF exercise, academics are increasingly asked to demonstrate how their research has impact outside of the academy, and speaking to the media is one way of getting research messages across to broader audiences. Unfortunately what ensues is not easy to predict or control!  Academic journals don’t usually grab popular media attention. However the press release announcing the launch of Porn Studies attracted a great deal of interest across the media in Summer 2013. While the news generated many positive responses, others suggested that for many the study of sexually explicit media remains a pointless, comical or distasteful task. In this paper I explore the difficulties of debating pornography in public.