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Please come to our second MEDIA @ SUSSEX Research Seminar of 2025, in SB302, between 16:30 – 18:30pm on Wednesday 12th March.
This seminar features three research presentations on the theme of Approaching Critiques: Concepts, Methods, and Analysis. Malcolm James will interrogate and explore the cultural conception and political perspective of the ‘alternative’. Gianna Goulding will develop a figurative methodology to map media, digital, and human discursive structures of AI from a feminist perspective. Chris Frantz will draw on the concept of ‘camp’ and analyse the parodic representation of wealth and excess in the popular television series The White Lotus. And Margaretta Jolly, Director of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR), will provide insights into how the Centre can support and inspire research objectives across the University of Sussex.
Media @ Sussex Research Seminar 2: Approaching Critiques: Concept, Methods, and Analysis
- The ‘mere’ alternative (Malcolm James)
This presentation lays the groundwork for thinking about the cultural politics of the alternative. Disparaged as the ‘mere’ alternative by the Resistance Through Rituals Collective, this talk establishes the ongoing persistence of the alternative in popular culture, argues that it is the cultural concept most suitable for this conjuncture’s malaise, and adopts a political perspective on the alternative’s study - to make an intervention in its name and to reorient the struggle for justice within social theory itself. This is not a question, of “arriving at the scene of an area devastated by an earthquake” and laying out a moth-eaten Persian carpet “to display the somewhat tarnished gold and silver vessels”, as Walter Benjamin said of Ernst Bloch but rather in a contemporary moment of fascist coalescence, to understand how alternative cultural politics moves through the materiality of the same moment.
Malcolm James is Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies, and Co-Director of Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies at Sussex. His research interests are in cultural studies and post-colonial approaches to race, nation, youth, the city, migration, music and sound.
- Using the Figurative Methodology to Analyse the AI Assistant (Gianna Goulding)
Gianna Goulding’s study aims to develop a new framework for understanding the contemporary feminised AI assistant as discourse using the figurative methodology. Highlighting the entwinement of fact and fictional narratives surrounding generative AI, the study builds on the figurative methodology as developed by Haraway, Castañeda, Ahmed and Tyler and applies this method to map the transfiguration of the AI assistant between screen and consumer markets. This enables an analysis of the AI assistant’s lineage from previously unconnected media, digital and human discursive structures, engaging critically with feminist scholarship in each of these areas. In this presentation, Gianna gives a brief summary of the figurative methodology and how it can reveal new and needed insights about the AI assistant.
Gianna Goulding is Postgraduate Researcher in Gender Studies (Humanities) at Sussex.
- Camp and Neoliberalism: How Jennifer Coolidge’s Acting Highlights a Parody of Wealth in The White Lotus (Chris Frantz)
“The White Lotus (HBO, 2021-) is a series which aims to parody wealth and excess of the ruling classes – those that attend luxurious hotels such as the fictional ‘White Lotus’ chain. Jennifer Coolidge, herself a gay and cultural icon of modern television, plays Tanya McQuoid, a wealthy heiress and hotel guest. In this study, Chris draws on the analytical concept of ‘camp’ and performs a close reading of key scenes which features Coolidge’s ironic portrayal of wealth. The study explores how the concept of ‘camp’ can be used beyond gender performativity and in the form of neoliberal critique.
Chris Frantz is Postgraduate Researcher in Film Studies at Sussex.
- What can the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research do (for you?) (Margaretta Jolly)
Life writing, oral history, life history, documentary, auto/biography, portraiture, biomythography, obituary, ecobiography, testimony, object lives, the digital everyday, Mass Observation … a capacious bag of tricks, genres, tools and debates indeed. Margaretta (Jolly) will bring the bag to see what’s useful to media, cultural studies and journalism, not least when true stories are fakes and life writing becomes death writing.
Margaretta Jolly is Professor of Cultural Studies and has directed the CLHLWR since 2007. She is currently working on the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Life Writing with Craig Howes.