The Politics of Popular Culture: My Research Journey

I have been passionately involved in academia for the last four years. After graduating from the University of Sheffield with a first-class degree in Politics and International Relations, I embarked on work as a researcher and research assistant on a variety of projects. With this experience, I have taken to conducting my own research projects with a focus on investigating the intersection of culture, economics, and psychology.

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In 2021, I conducted a six-week investigation into how the depiction of Civil Rights History in cinema was shaped by various funding models. Work like this sits at the foundations of my ongoing PhD which investigates the psychological mechanisms that work on audiences of art and culture to understand how theatre, film, poetry, and other cultural artefacts influence our political opinions and behaviour. My PhD focuses on how art has enabled the production and resistence of white supremacy.

 

This research, funded by the White Rose DTP Studentship and the Stuart Hall foundation, has an intense focus on both interdisceplanry and co-produced research. On the latter, I will be working with a number of freelancers, creatives, and audiences over the next few years to shape the project. On the former, this research relies on a variety of authors and theories to ground my knowledge. From Stuart Hall and Edward Said to Susan Strange and RD Laing, my influences are broad. My focus however, is on finding points of synthesis between cultural studies, emotion studies, and ontological security.