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The Department of Media offers programmes in television, radio, music production, media and film studies, advertising, photography and journalism at our campus sites in Chester and Warrington, serving more than 500 students at undergraduate, Master’s and PhD levels.
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Beat Soundtrack #33: Simon A. MorrisonDr Simon A. Morrison is interviewed for Rock & The Beat Generation about the relationship between the Beat and Rave scenes.
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Interview #28: Simon A. Morrison Beats on the dancefloor?Dr Morrison was influenced about his writing (specifically Dancefloor-Driven Literature) and wider career for the influential Substack publication.
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Transatlantic drift: The ebb and flow of dance music (podcast)I contributed an episode to the New Books Network podcast series looking at my last book, with my Transatlantic Drift co-author, Katie Milestone. Katie takes the story from WWII to the Millennium, then I carry it from there to the Millennium.
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A brief history of dance musicArticle featured in The Conversation on a brief history of dance music – from basements to beaches, dancefloors have mirrored social change.
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Book review: Jack Kerouac – Self-portrait: Collected Writings Edited by Paul Maher Jnr and Charles Shuttleworth (Sal Paradise Press / Rare Bird, 2025)Kerouac works unseen, unread but not unloved
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The beat travels back over the pond: UK and continental Europe, 1985-1990Titled Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music, this book tracks the evolving story of electronic dance music from WWII to the Millennium, as the beat bounced between Europe and North America. It will be published by Reaktion, in 2024. Music is not formed in isolation; humans are social animals, keen to draw on influences, to come together collectively, to share music, whether in their hometowns or travelling the world to share melody, and to feel the beat, communally. From Detroit to Wigan; from Dusseldorf to Chicago; from New York to Ibiza, the story of dance music has been a conversation between many people, in many, many different areas, communicating through the beat. This book will interrogate those ideas.
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Home for the (Hollywood) holidays: Fathers, family, and the “true” meaning of Christmas on screenSince the 1940s, Hollywood has dominated the construction of the festive season in the Anglo-American cultural imaginary. The Hollywood Christmas film, commonly combining generic elements of comedy, drama, and/or romance, invariably centres on the family, whether its formation, its estrangement, or its idiosyncrasies, vulnerabilities and, inevitably, its resilience. Central to many such films, and building on a well-worn narrative that reaches all the way back to A Christmas Carol, is a man who must learn the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas. This lesson is invariably shaped by his fatherhood. (Re)discovering joy in the paternal role, or rejecting individual or financial achievement in favour of familial contentment, become pathways to masculine redemption. In exploring fatherhood in relation to this under-studied but commercially enduring form, this chapter examines examples including Elf (2003), Christmas with the Kranks (2004), Deck the Halls (2006), Four Christmases (2008), Love the Coopers (2015) and Daddy’s Home 2 (2017), interrogating the redemptive paternal narratives embedded within. In doing so, it acknowledges the particular construction of white, middle-class fatherhood in these films, and discusses this in the wider context of anxious white masculinity in post-millennial Hollywood. Into the twenty-first century, when Hollywood began to embrace a wider diversity of representation and express a tentative ambivalence towards the monolithic white, middle-class, American, heteronormative nuclear unit that has heretofore constituted the cinematic “family”, the contemporary Christmas film remains as a curiously nostalgic, conservative expression of family and, particularly, paternal values.
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Elvis: Other Stories to TellIn Rethinking Elvis, popular music scholars and historians look beyond Elvis' iconography to shine a light on the branding, historical and geographic reception, heritage, and fan phenomenon that sustain his legacy.
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The Future of Elvis StudiesElvis is someone who’s place in society and pop culture is inescapable, yet whose presence in the academic library and seminar room is virtually absent. In the decades-old, and now rather tired, staged battle between Elvis and the Beatles, on any quantifiable measure of scholarly interest, in academia the Fab Four would easily win. Despite Elvis’s iconism, and despite his evident and ongoing connection to a range of social issues, he constantly seems to miss the requirements for capturing scholarly attention. To some extent, Gilbert Rodman’s claim still holds true that intellectuals have traditionally been unwilling to see Presley as a figure of sufficient importance to undertake serious critical work on his life, his art, or his cultural impact. With their concerns for taste and text, film studies and popular music studies have tended to ignore Elvis. In contrast, disciplines that grapple with those same subjects as social issues have embraced the Elvis phenomenon because it is a useful case study when considering prejudice. In this section I will therefore explore three academic fields that have discussed Elvis Presley, or more precisely the issues that he represents: Southern studies, cultural studies, and legal studies. In addition to these, Elvis “scholar-fans” have produced a wealth of material, some of which is highly insightful and effectively blurs the lines between popular and academic publication. Finally, the chapter makes some suggestions about topics we might desire to see in future Elvis studies, based upon the concerns of fan studies and research on social identity. Though Elvis studies is more a trickle of scholarship than a sub-discipline, it has undergone an expansion in recent times and, like Elvis Presley himself, shows no sign of disappearing.
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Mark Duffett reflects on the issue of cultural appropriation - an interview with Jorge Carrega (in Portuguese)A discussion of the question of Elvis and cultural appropriation in interview format in Portguese.
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A life spent chasing the band? Female fans' autobiographiesThis chapter considers female fans’ book-length autobiographies, life stories written that recount years spent following stars, particularly from the worlds of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s rock and pop. Mass culture criticism, parasocial interaction, totemism, and participatory culture are widely understood as distinct paradigms through which academics can analyze media fandom. In parallel, I suggest they can also be seen as discursive resources that pop fans exploit in the development of autobiographic accounts. To explain this idea, I compare four case study books: My Ticket to Ride by Janice Mitchell (2021), Ah-Ha Moments by Larissa Bendell (2016), Bye, Bye Baby by Caroline Sullivan (2000), My Men, Mick and Me by Andee Baker (2020). My argument is that in such autobiographic accounts some female fans, particularly, play upon aspects of these familiar frames of thinking, not only to talk about their experiences of fandom, but also to frame their encounters inspirationally, and think about gender relations in ways that are potentially empowering.
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Gate People: Fan History Before Elvis Heritage at GracelandAcademic accounts sometimes suggest that Graceland tourism began when Elvis’s mansion was opened to the public five years after his passing. Disputing such assertions, this chapter provides a comparatively inductive, “hidden history” of early fan visits to the Graceland gates. Its methodological approach is deliberate. Academic discussions about fan tourism are, whether consciously or not, often shaped by existing ideas and paradigms. Unless researchers inductively investigate, and increase the resolution of their scholarly gaze, they will not be able to make the distinctions that move our understanding beyond the unproductive myths and generalizations that can inform academic research as easily as they can shape commercial writing. Using historical evidence, the chapter shows that there were several overlapping eras defined by different types and scales of fan activity. These include an early phase exemplified by the disabled fan Gary Pepper, the development of intelligent networks, ritual bus tours and birthday celebrations, and finally a “massification” period associated with larger crowds and negative press stereotyping. The chapter suggests that the famous Graceland music gates physically separated the star and his fans, but they were not “prison gates.” Instead, the Graceland gates functioned as a kind of semi-permeable membrane, allowing ordinary visitors limited entry into Elvis’s world. To conclude, the piece suggests that gate vigils have now become “imagined memories” in guidebook accounts whose real participants have been made comparatively anonymous so that contemporary consumers can imagine themselves occupying the fortunate positions of the actual “gate people.”
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Welsh Devolution and the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evolving social media strategiesThis chapter examines the expansion of a nascent political movement, tracing its use of social media, notably Twitter, to generate engagement and mobilise a wider network by exploiting the dynamic inherent in the platform. Yes Cymru was formally launched in 2016. Modelled on the Scottish ‘Yes’ campaign, to the extent of adopting near-identical iconography, it was given additional focus by the Brexit vote later that year, and another spike in engagement followed the December 2019 UK general election. The wider (UK) political context has shifted considerably, with the movement attempting to mobilise the increasingly prevalent view that the tectonic plates of British politics are shifting to such an extent that previously unthinkable concepts now seem feasible. By appropriating empirical research conducted utilising the social network analysis software ‘NodeXL’ and debating these findings in line with Denis Balsom’s (The National question again: Welsh political identity in the 1980s. Gomer, 1985) ostensibly outmoded ‘Three Wales Model’, this chapter examines the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wales both quantitatively and qualitatively. Moreover, it explores how Yes Cymru attempted to garner support for Welsh independence amidst the pandemic, in contrast to groups such as Abolish the Welsh Assembly who sought to generate closer ties to Westminster through staking anti-devolution claims.
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Continental drift: Historical perspectives on the framing of ‘Europe’ in the British PressThis chapter argues that the framing of ‘Europe’ in the UK news media saw a gradual adoption of geographically ‘distancing’ language from the early 1950s (and exponentially onwards to the 2016 referendum), which fed into political debate and profoundly shaped public opinion. From the geographically correct, but dated sounding ‘continent’ to the near-universal use of ‘Europe’ to describe ‘anywhere but here’, this analysis of digitized databases suggests that the British press has shaped public attitudes in a considerably more fundamental way than the well-documented attempts by populist politicians. The role of newspapers in the formulation and distribution of ideas, in a broad sense, underpins this study. The use of the word ‘Europe’ transcends geographical reality to encompass alternative worldviews, descriptions of political positions and affinity. This chapter will unpick this linguistic evolution, examining the data derived from content analysis through the prism of place representation, ideology and emotional association.
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TransEurope Express: Europe… and the USA… to the MillenniumTitled Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music, this book tracks the evolving story of electronic dance music from WWII to the Millennium, as the beat bounced between Europe and North America. It will be published by Reaktion, in 2024. Music is not formed in isolation; humans are social animals, keen to draw on influences, to come together collectively, to share music, whether in their hometowns or travelling the world to share melody, and to feel the beat, communally. From Detroit to Wigan; from Dusseldorf to Chicago; from New York to Ibiza, the story of dance music has been a conversation between many people, in many, many different areas, communicating through the beat. This book will interrogate those ideas.
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Preface to Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance MusicTitled Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music, this book tracks the evolving story of electronic dance music from WWII to the Millennium, as the beat bounced between Europe and North America. It will be published by Reaktion, in 2024. Music is not formed in isolation; humans are social animals, keen to draw on influences, to come together collectively, to share music, whether in their hometowns or travelling the world to share melody, and to feel the beat, communally. From Detroit to Wigan; from Dusseldorf to Chicago; from New York to Ibiza, the story of dance music has been a conversation between many people, in many, many different areas, communicating through the beat. This book will interrogate those ideas.
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New York, Chicago and Detroit in late 80s (ish) USATitled Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music, this book tracks the evolving story of electronic dance music from WWII to the Millennium, as the beat bounced between Europe and North America. It will be published by Reaktion, in 2025. Music is not formed in isolation; humans are social animals, keen to draw on influences, to come together collectively, to share music, whether in their hometowns or travelling the world to share melody, and to feel the beat, communally. From Detroit to Wigan; from Dusseldorf to Chicago; from New York to Ibiza, the story of dance music has been a conversation between many people, in many, many different areas, communicating through the beat. This book will interrogate those ideas.
