J Raisborough
Biographic Data
| ID | 19812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Raisborough |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Raisborough |
| SIGNATURE | RAISBOROUGH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Brighton |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2083-1007 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 203 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Observing weight stigma in the editing of UK factual welfare programming
Media representations of fat and weight play a central role in the circulation of weight stigma. However, the production practices involved have received little attention. This paper focuses on the editing techniques deployed in a UK reality television documentary series, On Benefits. Our analysis of cutaway shots suggests a quantitative and qualitative difference between an episode featuring “obese” people claiming welfare, compared to the rest …
The Cutaway to the Toilet: Towards a Visual Grammar of Spatial Stigma in Factual Welfare Television
Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax - or 'visual grammar' - of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5's documentary series On Benefits (2015-2019), we conduct a visual grammar analysis to argue tha…
Reduced to curtain twitchers? Age, ageism and the careers of four women actors
Cultural gerontology has developed critical work around cultural representations of age and aging and their role in the reproduction of ageism. However, the cultural industries as producers and disseminators of representations remain under researched. This paper draws on a focus group with four older women actors to argue that workforce allocation and assumptions about audience demographics intersect with cultural attitudes around women's aging t…
‘It’s like Going to the Regular Class but without Being there’: A Qualitative Analysis of Older people’s Experiences of Exercise in the Home during Covid-19 Lockdown in England
It is expected that the Covid-19 lockdown will have increased physical inactivity with negative impacts for older people, who are at greater risk of health complications from the virus. This paper draws on customer evaluation questionnaire of a Pilates class aimed at people aged over 50 years old, which transitioned from a studio setting to online classes via Zoom at the start of the lockdown in England. The paper aims to (i) evaluate the shift o…
Critical Future Studies and Age: Attending to Future Imaginings of Age and Ageing
This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring managem…
From Streetscapes to Sofas: Representations of Place and Space in Britain's Benefit Blackspots
Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this article, we combine agnotology - the study of manufactured ignorance - with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5's Britain's Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject 'welfare claimant' in Brita…
Underground tales, overground lives: Mobile work identities through to post-retirement
Although there has been recent attention given to the subject of mobile work, there has been less focus, within mobility studies, on the work of those who enable movement: the job of the transport worker. This article takes this incarnation of mobile workers as the basis for understanding the ways in which mobile work identities are pulled through into retirement. The article first proposes that transport workers, as movement enablers, have parti…
When fat meets disability in poverty porn: Exploring the cultural mechanisms of suspicion in Too Fat to Work
There has been a distinct neglect of dis/ability in socio-cultural analysis of poverty porn. This paper applies framing analysis to reality TV documentaries that feature larger bodied, disabled, welfare claimants to examine how cultural literacies of fatness and ‘obesity’ are drawn upon to cast suspicion upon disability welfare claimants in so-called poverty-porn. With a focus on Channel 5's Benefit Britain series, Benefiits Too Fat to Work we de…
Fat Bodies, Health and the Media
Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a mul
Why we Should be Watching More Trash TV: Exploring the Value of an Analysis of the Makeover Show to Fat Studies Scholars
This article serves as a critical introduction to the genre of the “makeover show” as a way of encouraging the growth of a still nascent body of work. The article draws from a wider discourse analysis to argue that the makeover’s story of transformation not only enables but also depends on benevolent, sympathetic representations of fat individuals. Yet, an analysis of the makeover indicates the range and complexity of the cultural labors that con…
Stretching middle age: The lessons and labours of active ageing in the makeover show
This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic function of the makeover culture, and the prevailing public policy discourses that place responsibility on …
Media and Class-making: What Lessons Are Learnt When a Celebrity Chav Dies
Class is often overlooked in sociological studies of death, just as studies of class overlook death. The controversial media coverage of the death of Jade Goody provides a useful focus for exploring contemporary class-making. Recent sociological analyses of class representations in popular culture have demonstrated how denigration and humiliation serve as mechanisms which position sections of the white, working class (chavs) as repositories of ba…
Making death 'good: Instructional tales for dying in newspaper accounts of Jade Goody's death
Facilitating a 'good' death is a central goal for hospices and palliative care organisations. The key features of such a death include an acceptance of death, an open awareness of and communication about death, the settling of practical and interpersonal business, the reduction of suffering and pain, and the enhancement of autonomy, choice and control. Yet deaths are inherently neither good nor bad; they require cultural labour to be 'made over' …
Shame and Pride in How to Look Good Naked: The affective dynamics of (mis)recognition
Most academic work exploring the makeover genre has argued that TV “experts” draw on a narrative of humiliation to push the participant to adopt more appropriate forms of feminine appearance. However, shows like How to Look Good Naked, while sharing the problematic logics of the makeover, are qualitatively different in tone and style from more aggressive shows. We extend emerging analyses which argue that makeover shows can be read as reflecting …
The self-control ethos and the ‘chav’: Unpacking cultural representations of the white working class
This paper applies Joffe and Staerklé’s self-control ethos to cultural representations of the white working class. We initially follow their identification of three aspects of the self-control ethos — mind, body, and destiny — to show the explanatory value of the concept, before considering four possible avenues through which the self-control ethos may be developed: the extent to which it is the interrelationship between the separate aspects of t…
C’mon girlfriend: Sisterhood, sexuality and the space of the benign in makeover TV
In the context of a purported shift from humiliation to the benign exemplified by the marked contrast between How to Look Good Naked and What Not to Wear, this article examines the cultural work performed by the ‘space of the benign’. We identify three main mechanisms — body appreciation, synthetic friendship and suspended sexuality — which manipulate existing constructions of female friendship and homosexuality to produce the host as the ‘gay be…
Making a difference: Ethical Consumption and the Everyday
Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to 'make a difference' via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of 'ethics' and 'consumption' are mediated, we explore how 'ethical' opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in the everyday. The 'everyday' is approached here via a sp…
Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White, Working Class
We draw on 'new' class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often pre…
What Can Sociology Say About FairTrade: Class, Reflexivity and Ethical Consumption
This article critically considers the 'fit' between FairTrade consumption and conceptualizations of the reflexive project of selfhood . By outlining the ways in which FairTrade products are marketed, we argue that a particular and partial reflexivity is invoked and mobilized. Following from recent class debates which apply a Bourdieusian analysis to explore the operations of everyday class distinctions, we explore what such an analysis can offer …
Gender and Serious Leisure Careers: A Case Study of Women Sea Cadets
A central defining feature of serious leisure is the career afforded to its participants. This paper adds to emerging challenges to prevailing conceptualizations of the career as linear and progressive by exploring the lived experiences of women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps (SCC). By focusing on the plays of gender relations within and beyond the serious leisure social world, this paper demonstrates that women's relations to their career are s…
Women's Leisure and Auto/Biography: Empowerment and Resistance in the Garden
This exploratory paper addresses prevailing conceptualisations of women's agency in leisure. It focuses on the reproduction/resistance framework characteristic of much feminist work. Realising the role of leisure in reproducing oppressive gender relations and the various ways that leisure can also resist them is vital to the continual politicisation of leisure, however we explore whether this framework can always adequately realise the complexiti…
Getting Onboard: Women, Access and Serious Leisure
This paper explores women's experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women's ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women's agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention …
Research note: The concept of serious leisure and women's experiences of the Sea Cadet Corps
This note describes the conceptual importance of 'serious' leisure while highlighting its theoretical weaknesses when speaking both to and from the experiences of women in the Sea Cadet Corps (a uniformed youth organization). I claim that although women's experiences challenge some of the assumptions made by serious leisure, the concept of serious leisure remains, as yet, a positive framework in which these experiences may be grounded. It is, how…
Making a difference: Ethical Consumption and the Everyday
Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to 'make a difference' via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of 'ethics' and 'consumption' are mediated, we explore how 'ethical' opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in the everyday. The 'everyday' is approached here via a sp…
What Can Sociology Say About FairTrade: Class, Reflexivity and Ethical Consumption
This article critically considers the 'fit' between FairTrade consumption and conceptualizations of the reflexive project of selfhood . By outlining the ways in which FairTrade products are marketed, we argue that a particular and partial reflexivity is invoked and mobilized. Following from recent class debates which apply a Bourdieusian analysis to explore the operations of everyday class distinctions, we explore what such an analysis can offer …
Women's Leisure and Auto/Biography: Empowerment and Resistance in the Garden
This exploratory paper addresses prevailing conceptualisations of women's agency in leisure. It focuses on the reproduction/resistance framework characteristic of much feminist work. Realising the role of leisure in reproducing oppressive gender relations and the various ways that leisure can also resist them is vital to the continual politicisation of leisure, however we explore whether this framework can always adequately realise the complexiti…
Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White, Working Class
We draw on 'new' class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often pre…
Getting Onboard: Women, Access and Serious Leisure
This paper explores women's experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women's ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women's agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention …
C’mon girlfriend: Sisterhood, sexuality and the space of the benign in makeover TV
In the context of a purported shift from humiliation to the benign exemplified by the marked contrast between How to Look Good Naked and What Not to Wear, this article examines the cultural work performed by the ‘space of the benign’. We identify three main mechanisms — body appreciation, synthetic friendship and suspended sexuality — which manipulate existing constructions of female friendship and homosexuality to produce the host as the ‘gay be…
Research note: The concept of serious leisure and women's experiences of the Sea Cadet Corps
This note describes the conceptual importance of 'serious' leisure while highlighting its theoretical weaknesses when speaking both to and from the experiences of women in the Sea Cadet Corps (a uniformed youth organization). I claim that although women's experiences challenge some of the assumptions made by serious leisure, the concept of serious leisure remains, as yet, a positive framework in which these experiences may be grounded. It is, how…
Gender and Serious Leisure Careers: A Case Study of Women Sea Cadets
A central defining feature of serious leisure is the career afforded to its participants. This paper adds to emerging challenges to prevailing conceptualizations of the career as linear and progressive by exploring the lived experiences of women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps (SCC). By focusing on the plays of gender relations within and beyond the serious leisure social world, this paper demonstrates that women's relations to their career are s…
Media and Class-making: What Lessons Are Learnt When a Celebrity Chav Dies
Class is often overlooked in sociological studies of death, just as studies of class overlook death. The controversial media coverage of the death of Jade Goody provides a useful focus for exploring contemporary class-making. Recent sociological analyses of class representations in popular culture have demonstrated how denigration and humiliation serve as mechanisms which position sections of the white, working class (chavs) as repositories of ba…
Making death 'good: Instructional tales for dying in newspaper accounts of Jade Goody's death
Facilitating a 'good' death is a central goal for hospices and palliative care organisations. The key features of such a death include an acceptance of death, an open awareness of and communication about death, the settling of practical and interpersonal business, the reduction of suffering and pain, and the enhancement of autonomy, choice and control. Yet deaths are inherently neither good nor bad; they require cultural labour to be 'made over' …
The Cutaway to the Toilet: Towards a Visual Grammar of Spatial Stigma in Factual Welfare Television
Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax - or 'visual grammar' - of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5's documentary series On Benefits (2015-2019), we conduct a visual grammar analysis to argue tha…
From Streetscapes to Sofas: Representations of Place and Space in Britain's Benefit Blackspots
Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this article, we combine agnotology - the study of manufactured ignorance - with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5's Britain's Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject 'welfare claimant' in Brita…
Shame and Pride in How to Look Good Naked: The affective dynamics of (mis)recognition
Most academic work exploring the makeover genre has argued that TV “experts” draw on a narrative of humiliation to push the participant to adopt more appropriate forms of feminine appearance. However, shows like How to Look Good Naked, while sharing the problematic logics of the makeover, are qualitatively different in tone and style from more aggressive shows. We extend emerging analyses which argue that makeover shows can be read as reflecting …
When fat meets disability in poverty porn: Exploring the cultural mechanisms of suspicion in Too Fat to Work
There has been a distinct neglect of dis/ability in socio-cultural analysis of poverty porn. This paper applies framing analysis to reality TV documentaries that feature larger bodied, disabled, welfare claimants to examine how cultural literacies of fatness and ‘obesity’ are drawn upon to cast suspicion upon disability welfare claimants in so-called poverty-porn. With a focus on Channel 5's Benefit Britain series, Benefiits Too Fat to Work we de…
Stretching middle age: The lessons and labours of active ageing in the makeover show
This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic function of the makeover culture, and the prevailing public policy discourses that place responsibility on …
Critical Future Studies and Age: Attending to Future Imaginings of Age and Ageing
This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring managem…
Research note: The concept of serious leisure and women's experiences of the Sea Cadet Corps
This note describes the conceptual importance of 'serious' leisure while highlighting its theoretical weaknesses when speaking both to and from the experiences of women in the Sea Cadet Corps (a uniformed youth organization). I claim that although women's experiences challenge some of the assumptions made by serious leisure, the concept of serious leisure remains, as yet, a positive framework in which these experiences may be grounded. It is, how…
Getting Onboard: Women, Access and Serious Leisure
This paper explores women's experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women's ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women's agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention …
Gender and Serious Leisure Careers: A Case Study of Women Sea Cadets
A central defining feature of serious leisure is the career afforded to its participants. This paper adds to emerging challenges to prevailing conceptualizations of the career as linear and progressive by exploring the lived experiences of women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps (SCC). By focusing on the plays of gender relations within and beyond the serious leisure social world, this paper demonstrates that women's relations to their career are s…
Women's Leisure and Auto/Biography: Empowerment and Resistance in the Garden
This exploratory paper addresses prevailing conceptualisations of women's agency in leisure. It focuses on the reproduction/resistance framework characteristic of much feminist work. Realising the role of leisure in reproducing oppressive gender relations and the various ways that leisure can also resist them is vital to the continual politicisation of leisure, however we explore whether this framework can always adequately realise the complexiti…
Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White, Working Class
We draw on 'new' class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often pre…
What Can Sociology Say About FairTrade: Class, Reflexivity and Ethical Consumption
This article critically considers the 'fit' between FairTrade consumption and conceptualizations of the reflexive project of selfhood . By outlining the ways in which FairTrade products are marketed, we argue that a particular and partial reflexivity is invoked and mobilized. Following from recent class debates which apply a Bourdieusian analysis to explore the operations of everyday class distinctions, we explore what such an analysis can offer …
C’mon girlfriend: Sisterhood, sexuality and the space of the benign in makeover TV
In the context of a purported shift from humiliation to the benign exemplified by the marked contrast between How to Look Good Naked and What Not to Wear, this article examines the cultural work performed by the ‘space of the benign’. We identify three main mechanisms — body appreciation, synthetic friendship and suspended sexuality — which manipulate existing constructions of female friendship and homosexuality to produce the host as the ‘gay be…
Making a difference: Ethical Consumption and the Everyday
Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to 'make a difference' via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of 'ethics' and 'consumption' are mediated, we explore how 'ethical' opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in the everyday. The 'everyday' is approached here via a sp…
The self-control ethos and the ‘chav’: Unpacking cultural representations of the white working class
This paper applies Joffe and Staerklé’s self-control ethos to cultural representations of the white working class. We initially follow their identification of three aspects of the self-control ethos — mind, body, and destiny — to show the explanatory value of the concept, before considering four possible avenues through which the self-control ethos may be developed: the extent to which it is the interrelationship between the separate aspects of t…
Shame and Pride in How to Look Good Naked: The affective dynamics of (mis)recognition
Most academic work exploring the makeover genre has argued that TV “experts” draw on a narrative of humiliation to push the participant to adopt more appropriate forms of feminine appearance. However, shows like How to Look Good Naked, while sharing the problematic logics of the makeover, are qualitatively different in tone and style from more aggressive shows. We extend emerging analyses which argue that makeover shows can be read as reflecting …
Media and Class-making: What Lessons Are Learnt When a Celebrity Chav Dies
Class is often overlooked in sociological studies of death, just as studies of class overlook death. The controversial media coverage of the death of Jade Goody provides a useful focus for exploring contemporary class-making. Recent sociological analyses of class representations in popular culture have demonstrated how denigration and humiliation serve as mechanisms which position sections of the white, working class (chavs) as repositories of ba…
Making death 'good: Instructional tales for dying in newspaper accounts of Jade Goody's death
Facilitating a 'good' death is a central goal for hospices and palliative care organisations. The key features of such a death include an acceptance of death, an open awareness of and communication about death, the settling of practical and interpersonal business, the reduction of suffering and pain, and the enhancement of autonomy, choice and control. Yet deaths are inherently neither good nor bad; they require cultural labour to be 'made over' …
Why we Should be Watching More Trash TV: Exploring the Value of an Analysis of the Makeover Show to Fat Studies Scholars
This article serves as a critical introduction to the genre of the “makeover show” as a way of encouraging the growth of a still nascent body of work. The article draws from a wider discourse analysis to argue that the makeover’s story of transformation not only enables but also depends on benevolent, sympathetic representations of fat individuals. Yet, an analysis of the makeover indicates the range and complexity of the cultural labors that con…
Stretching middle age: The lessons and labours of active ageing in the makeover show
This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic function of the makeover culture, and the prevailing public policy discourses that place responsibility on …
Fat Bodies, Health and the Media
Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a mul
Underground tales, overground lives: Mobile work identities through to post-retirement
Although there has been recent attention given to the subject of mobile work, there has been less focus, within mobility studies, on the work of those who enable movement: the job of the transport worker. This article takes this incarnation of mobile workers as the basis for understanding the ways in which mobile work identities are pulled through into retirement. The article first proposes that transport workers, as movement enablers, have parti…
When fat meets disability in poverty porn: Exploring the cultural mechanisms of suspicion in Too Fat to Work
There has been a distinct neglect of dis/ability in socio-cultural analysis of poverty porn. This paper applies framing analysis to reality TV documentaries that feature larger bodied, disabled, welfare claimants to examine how cultural literacies of fatness and ‘obesity’ are drawn upon to cast suspicion upon disability welfare claimants in so-called poverty-porn. With a focus on Channel 5's Benefit Britain series, Benefiits Too Fat to Work we de…
‘It’s like Going to the Regular Class but without Being there’: A Qualitative Analysis of Older people’s Experiences of Exercise in the Home during Covid-19 Lockdown in England
It is expected that the Covid-19 lockdown will have increased physical inactivity with negative impacts for older people, who are at greater risk of health complications from the virus. This paper draws on customer evaluation questionnaire of a Pilates class aimed at people aged over 50 years old, which transitioned from a studio setting to online classes via Zoom at the start of the lockdown in England. The paper aims to (i) evaluate the shift o…
Critical Future Studies and Age: Attending to Future Imaginings of Age and Ageing
This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring managem…
From Streetscapes to Sofas: Representations of Place and Space in Britain's Benefit Blackspots
Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this article, we combine agnotology - the study of manufactured ignorance - with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5's Britain's Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject 'welfare claimant' in Brita…
Reduced to curtain twitchers? Age, ageism and the careers of four women actors
Cultural gerontology has developed critical work around cultural representations of age and aging and their role in the reproduction of ageism. However, the cultural industries as producers and disseminators of representations remain under researched. This paper draws on a focus group with four older women actors to argue that workforce allocation and assumptions about audience demographics intersect with cultural attitudes around women's aging t…
Observing weight stigma in the editing of UK factual welfare programming
Media representations of fat and weight play a central role in the circulation of weight stigma. However, the production practices involved have received little attention. This paper focuses on the editing techniques deployed in a UK reality television documentary series, On Benefits. Our analysis of cutaway shots suggests a quantitative and qualitative difference between an episode featuring “obese” people claiming welfare, compared to the rest …
The Cutaway to the Toilet: Towards a Visual Grammar of Spatial Stigma in Factual Welfare Television
Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax - or 'visual grammar' - of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5's documentary series On Benefits (2015-2019), we conduct a visual grammar analysis to argue tha…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (7 works)