Annette Hill
Biographic Data
| ID | 3687869 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annette Hill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annette |
| FAMILY NAME | Hill |
| SIGNATURE | HILL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8955-7184 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Audience frictions
Against a backdrop of new ways of engaging and configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical and empirical territories that follow the frictions of social tensions and resistance in challenging modes of being an audience. As audiences engage with media, including artificial intelligence and related technologies, they are encountering and dealing w…
The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences
As affective flatness entailing a sense of stuckness in the present, boredom is routinely cast as the conceptual and experiential opposite of interest indicative of the richness of experience. Taking a different analytical route, this chapter makes an argument for considering boredom and interest in dynamic relation with one another as oscillations in affective intensity. It further calls for adding nuance into what boredom actually means by addr…
Streaming platform imaginaries: Audiences and Southeast Asian streaming
Media Engagement
The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities
This is a state-of-the-art survey of an emerging area of study in media, communication and cultural studies, mobility studies and mobile communications.‘Mobile socialities’ demarcates a new area of research that captures people’s various and con- trary experiences of media in relation to their mobilities and socialities. The chapters in this volume are written by a range of international scholars offering a comprehensive overview and source of in…
Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities
Roamers: Audiences on the Move Across Entertainment Platforms In Southeast Asia
Media industries recognise the extent to which the potential audiences for their products are now made up significantly of “roamers,” people finding diverse routes through the options available and combining them in different ways. The main research question in this article is: what sort of precise movements, combinations and connections become possible for roaming audiences in rapidly expanding commercial entertainment platforms? The article dra…
Documentary imaginary: Production and audience research of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
Oppenheimer describes The Act of Killing as a ‘documentary about the imagination. We are documenting the ways we imagine ourselves, the ways we know ourselves’. This research analyses the documentary films The Act of Killing (Director Oppenheimer, co-directors Christine Cynn and anonymous 2012) and The Look of Silence (director Oppenheimer 2014), and the documentary imaginary. The research combines normally separate sites of analysis in productio…
Fear: Introduction to special issue
Fear needs dealing with. Fear demands to be abated, countered or turned into something else, contributing and curtailing how we ‘do’ being human beings. This special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies addresses fear within media and popular culture, adopting a cultural studies approach to fear in a variety of socio-cultural and political contexts. A cultural studies approach allows us to enhance the horizon of understanding cultura…
Media industries and audience research
This chapter offers a reflection on the value of dialogue across media industries and academia for enhancing the understanding of audience engagement and disengagement with media. The idea of an analytic dialogue – involving practitioners, researchers, and audiences and grounded in analyses of both production and reception – came about in discussing the value of qualitative audience research. The chapter highlights how production-cum-audience res…
Parameters of Media Engagement
Engagement is a tricky term to pin down, shifting meaning in the media industries, across political communication and within popular culture. But the definition of engagement matters, as new currencies circulate in academic and industry discourses. The argument put forward here is that media engagement is a term that has been used in a strategic way within the media industries to capture social media analytics and ratings performance, thus instru…
Who killed Utopia ? Cult conspiracy drama and a television imaginary
This article focuses on the production and reception of television drama, specifically the case study of conspiracy thriller Utopia. The empirical research is based on 21 production interviews with the makers of the drama and 56 interviews with audience members and fans of the drama. The concept of the television imaginary is used as an analytical lens for investigating the various ways television itself, and audiences and fans, are imagined and …
Television’s undoing of social distancing
At this critical moment in time, April 2020, when we are living with the cataclysmic event of Covid-19, television – a medium declared almost dead at the beginning of this millennium – has become a vital resource for solace, daydreaming, social ritual, knowledge and storytelling. In conditions of lockdown, we turn towards television, not away from it (Ellis, 2020; Negra, 2020). We are checking news on national channels, and tuning to live broadca…
Transgression in contemporary media culture
This is the introduction to a special issue on media and transgression, one of early cultural studies’ key terms. It inquires into the uses of transgression as a critical concept to query contemporary media culture which is discussed in six case studies: on political satire, Mukbang, cult drama, the policing of film piracy, media scandals, and online trolls. Transgression points to the energy that fuels the media ecology – from content and conten…
Provocative engagement: Documentary audiences and performances in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
Through an analysis of The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), this article explores the idea of provocative engagement as a way of extending our understanding of the affective dimensions of documentary and its role in civic engagement. The study draws on qualitative research, based on interviews with the filmmaker, and interviews with 52 viewers in Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Colombia. This data is used to explore the idea of su…
Popular Culture Forms: Reality TV
Reality TV is a container for a range of diverse programs, series, formats, and events in which elements of documentary, talent shows, gameshows, talkshows, soap operas, melodramas, and sports mix together to produce subgenres. Reality TV can be broadly defined into two intergeneric spaces that draw on various subvariants of other genres across fact, drama, and entertainment; these definitions include the “world space” of reality TV set in real‐w…
Live reality television: Care structures within the production and reception of talent shows
This article focuses on production and reception practices for live reality television using critical theory and empirical research to question how producers and audiences co-create and limit live experiences. The concept of care structures is used to make visible hidden labour in the creation of mood, in particular audiences as participants in the management of live experiences. In the case of Got to Dance, there was a play off between the value…
Religion and Reality TV: Faith in Late Capitalism
Media audiences and reception studies
Media audiences and reception studies is a shifting area of research in terms of theories and concepts, methodologies and methods. Audiences are on the move, and ways of understanding these transitions involves multi-faceted, pragmatic approaches to varieties of audience experiences in context, including contexts of distribution and media flows, genres and communicative form, and identities and everyday life. The range of methodologies and method…
Media Experiences: Engaging with Drama and Reality Television
Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale
Reality TV Engagement: Producer and Audience Relations for Reality Talent Shows
This article focuses on media engagement within the reality television industry. It draws on qualitative research of production practices and audience participation in live reality events to explore the multiple meanings of engagement as a series of relationships between creative and executive producers, broadcasters, performers, and audiences. A key question concerns how do producers and audiences cocreate, shape, and limit engagement with reali…
Popular Culture Forms: Culture and Icons
Sociologists have addressed a wide range of topics under the heading of popular culture. In fact, there are far too many to cover adequately in this encyclopedia. Thus, a decision was made to give at least a sense of this literature by sampling some of the key topics examined by sociologists and offering an indication of the way in which they have been covered. A variety of forms of popular culture are considered: the beach, hip‐hop, jazz, P2P, r…
Push–Pull Dynamics: Producer and Audience Practices for Television Drama Format The Bridge
This article explores push–pull dynamics in television drama production and reception. Push–pull dynamics are understood as complicated power relations in the transactions between television industries and audiences. The research is underpinned by qualitative data, drawing on more than 170 participants in interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, with producers and audiences from Northern Europe and North and South America. A case s…
Passion: Introduction to Special Issue
There is a dark side to passion: a black heart, something malicious and not to be trusted. This Special Issue1 looks at the tensions between the positive and particularly the negative connotations of passion. This is the kind of passion where an adoring fan can become a menacing stalker. Or a ritual December celebration turns into a contested site of race relations. Often, when we think of media and passion, the first things that come to mind con…
Big Brother: The Real Audience
In this article, the author focuses on Big Brother in relation to audience attraction. I outline the context of factual entertainment and its audience, and the specific experience of watching Big Brother. Seen in relation to factual entertainment as a whole, Big Brother is one of the least popular examples of “documentary as diversion.” Seen in relation to gamedocs, Big Brother is one of the most popular examples of new factual entertainment. The…
Restyling Factual TV: The Reception of News, Documentary, and Reality Genres
Addressing the wide range of programmes and formats from news, to documentary, to popular factual genres, Annette Hill’s new book examines the ways viewers navigate their way through a busy, noisy and constantly changing factual television environment. Restyling Factual TV addresses the wide range of programmes that fall within the category of 'factuality', from politics, to natural history, to reality entertainment. Based on research with audien…
Television’s undoing of social distancing
At this critical moment in time, April 2020, when we are living with the cataclysmic event of Covid-19, television – a medium declared almost dead at the beginning of this millennium – has become a vital resource for solace, daydreaming, social ritual, knowledge and storytelling. In conditions of lockdown, we turn towards television, not away from it (Ellis, 2020; Negra, 2020). We are checking news on national channels, and tuning to live broadca…
Reality TV
Reality TV is popular entertainment. And yet a common way to start a conversation about it is ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to know this but...’ Why do people love and love to hate reality TV? This book explores reality TV in all its forms - from competitive talent shows to reality soaps - examining a range of programmes from the mundane to those that revel in the spectacle of excess. Annette Hill’s research draws on interviews with television producer…
Media risks: The social amplification of risk and the media violence debate
This article examines the conceptual framework of the social amplification of risk in relation to the social sciences framework of moral panic and the media violence debate in Britain. The paper will explore the symbolic use of 'risk' in relation to the alleged negative effects of media violence, and analyse the key stages in the social amplification of the physical and moral risks of media violence. Specific risk events in Britain, such as the d…
Public and Popular: British and Swedish Audience Trends in Factual and Reality Television
The research in this article examines audience responses to a range of factual and reality genres. It takes as a starting point that television audiences do not experience news or documentary or reality TV in isolation but as part of a range of factual and reality programmes. Factual and reality programming includes a broad understanding of non-fictional programming on broadcast television, satellite, cable and digital television. The breakdown o…
Fearful and Safe: Audience Response to British Reality Programming
Spectacle of excess: The passion work of professional wrestlers, fans and anti-fans
This article examines how professional wrestlers, promoters and audiences perform the passion work of sports entertainment. Rather than celebrate professional wrestling as a popular phenomenon, this articles seeks to use empirical research on live wrestling events to understand the meaning of passion work in sports entertainment. In Roland Barthes' seminal article on professional wrestling in Mythologies, he describes wrestling as a spectacle of …
Transgression in contemporary media culture
This is the introduction to a special issue on media and transgression, one of early cultural studies’ key terms. It inquires into the uses of transgression as a critical concept to query contemporary media culture which is discussed in six case studies: on political satire, Mukbang, cult drama, the policing of film piracy, media scandals, and online trolls. Transgression points to the energy that fuels the media ecology – from content and conten…
Provocative engagement: Documentary audiences and performances in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
Through an analysis of The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), this article explores the idea of provocative engagement as a way of extending our understanding of the affective dimensions of documentary and its role in civic engagement. The study draws on qualitative research, based on interviews with the filmmaker, and interviews with 52 viewers in Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Colombia. This data is used to explore the idea of su…
Live reality television: Care structures within the production and reception of talent shows
This article focuses on production and reception practices for live reality television using critical theory and empirical research to question how producers and audiences co-create and limit live experiences. The concept of care structures is used to make visible hidden labour in the creation of mood, in particular audiences as participants in the management of live experiences. In the case of Got to Dance, there was a play off between the value…
Reality TV Engagement: Producer and Audience Relations for Reality Talent Shows
This article focuses on media engagement within the reality television industry. It draws on qualitative research of production practices and audience participation in live reality events to explore the multiple meanings of engagement as a series of relationships between creative and executive producers, broadcasters, performers, and audiences. A key question concerns how do producers and audiences cocreate, shape, and limit engagement with reali…
Push–Pull Dynamics: Producer and Audience Practices for Television Drama Format The Bridge
This article explores push–pull dynamics in television drama production and reception. Push–pull dynamics are understood as complicated power relations in the transactions between television industries and audiences. The research is underpinned by qualitative data, drawing on more than 170 participants in interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, with producers and audiences from Northern Europe and North and South America. A case s…
Introduction to Civic Cultures
The idea of civic cultures encapsulates our engagement with the political and nonpolitical in social and cultural life. This special issue of Television and New Media explores civic cultures in the context of politics, media, and society. Researchers critically examine how civic cultures can be stepping stones toward democratic ideals. In his book Media and Political Engagement (2009), Peter Dahlgren proposes a circuit of civic cultures located a…
Big Brother
The language of complaint
Fearful and Safe: Audience Response to British Reality Programming
The language of complaint
Media risks: The social amplification of risk and the media violence debate
This article examines the conceptual framework of the social amplification of risk in relation to the social sciences framework of moral panic and the media violence debate in Britain. The paper will explore the symbolic use of 'risk' in relation to the alleged negative effects of media violence, and analyse the key stages in the social amplification of the physical and moral risks of media violence. Specific risk events in Britain, such as the d…
Big Brother: The Real Audience
In this article, the author focuses on Big Brother in relation to audience attraction. I outline the context of factual entertainment and its audience, and the specific experience of watching Big Brother. Seen in relation to factual entertainment as a whole, Big Brother is one of the least popular examples of “documentary as diversion.” Seen in relation to gamedocs, Big Brother is one of the most popular examples of new factual entertainment. The…
Big Brother
Reality TV: Factual Entertainment and Television Audiences
Reality TV restores a crucial, and often absent, element to the critical debate about reality television: the voices of people who watch reality programmes. From Animal Hospital to Big Brother, Annette Hill argues that much can be learned from listening to audience discussion about this popular and rapidly changing television genre. Viewers' responses to reality TV can provide invaluable information to enhance our understanding of both the realit…
Restyling Factual TV: The Reception of News, Documentary, and Reality Genres
Addressing the wide range of programmes and formats from news, to documentary, to popular factual genres, Annette Hill’s new book examines the ways viewers navigate their way through a busy, noisy and constantly changing factual television environment. Restyling Factual TV addresses the wide range of programmes that fall within the category of 'factuality', from politics, to natural history, to reality entertainment. Based on research with audien…
Public and Popular: British and Swedish Audience Trends in Factual and Reality Television
The research in this article examines audience responses to a range of factual and reality genres. It takes as a starting point that television audiences do not experience news or documentary or reality TV in isolation but as part of a range of factual and reality programmes. Factual and reality programming includes a broad understanding of non-fictional programming on broadcast television, satellite, cable and digital television. The breakdown o…
Popular Culture Forms: RealityTV
Reality TV is a catchall category that includes a wide range of popular factual programs. Sometimes called factual entertainment, or infotainment, reality TV is located in border territories, between information and entertainment, documentary and drama. Originally used as a category for law and order programming, reality TV has become the success story of television in the 1990s and 2000s
Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture
The paranormal has gone mainstream.Beliefs are on the rise, with almost half of the British population, and two thirds of Americans, claiming to believe in extra sensory perceptions and hauntings. Psychic magazines like Spirit and Destiny, television shows such as Fringe, Ghost Whisperer and Most Haunted, ghost-cams and e-poltergeists, bestselling books on mind, body and spirit, and magicians like Derren Brown have moved from the outer limits to …
The Audience is the Show
Introduction to Civic Cultures
The idea of civic cultures encapsulates our engagement with the political and nonpolitical in social and cultural life. This special issue of Television and New Media explores civic cultures in the context of politics, media, and society. Researchers critically examine how civic cultures can be stepping stones toward democratic ideals. In his book Media and Political Engagement (2009), Peter Dahlgren proposes a circuit of civic cultures located a…
Reality TV
Reality TV is popular entertainment. And yet a common way to start a conversation about it is ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to know this but...’ Why do people love and love to hate reality TV? This book explores reality TV in all its forms - from competitive talent shows to reality soaps - examining a range of programmes from the mundane to those that revel in the spectacle of excess. Annette Hill’s research draws on interviews with television producer…
Spectacle of excess: The passion work of professional wrestlers, fans and anti-fans
This article examines how professional wrestlers, promoters and audiences perform the passion work of sports entertainment. Rather than celebrate professional wrestling as a popular phenomenon, this articles seeks to use empirical research on live wrestling events to understand the meaning of passion work in sports entertainment. In Roland Barthes' seminal article on professional wrestling in Mythologies, he describes wrestling as a spectacle of …
Push–Pull Dynamics: Producer and Audience Practices for Television Drama Format The Bridge
This article explores push–pull dynamics in television drama production and reception. Push–pull dynamics are understood as complicated power relations in the transactions between television industries and audiences. The research is underpinned by qualitative data, drawing on more than 170 participants in interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, with producers and audiences from Northern Europe and North and South America. A case s…
Passion: Introduction to Special Issue
There is a dark side to passion: a black heart, something malicious and not to be trusted. This Special Issue1 looks at the tensions between the positive and particularly the negative connotations of passion. This is the kind of passion where an adoring fan can become a menacing stalker. Or a ritual December celebration turns into a contested site of race relations. Often, when we think of media and passion, the first things that come to mind con…
Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale
Reality TV Engagement: Producer and Audience Relations for Reality Talent Shows
This article focuses on media engagement within the reality television industry. It draws on qualitative research of production practices and audience participation in live reality events to explore the multiple meanings of engagement as a series of relationships between creative and executive producers, broadcasters, performers, and audiences. A key question concerns how do producers and audiences cocreate, shape, and limit engagement with reali…
Popular Culture Forms: Culture and Icons
Sociologists have addressed a wide range of topics under the heading of popular culture. In fact, there are far too many to cover adequately in this encyclopedia. Thus, a decision was made to give at least a sense of this literature by sampling some of the key topics examined by sociologists and offering an indication of the way in which they have been covered. A variety of forms of popular culture are considered: the beach, hip‐hop, jazz, P2P, r…
Religion and Reality TV: Faith in Late Capitalism
Media audiences and reception studies
Media audiences and reception studies is a shifting area of research in terms of theories and concepts, methodologies and methods. Audiences are on the move, and ways of understanding these transitions involves multi-faceted, pragmatic approaches to varieties of audience experiences in context, including contexts of distribution and media flows, genres and communicative form, and identities and everyday life. The range of methodologies and method…
Media Experiences: Engaging with Drama and Reality Television
Provocative engagement: Documentary audiences and performances in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
Through an analysis of The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), this article explores the idea of provocative engagement as a way of extending our understanding of the affective dimensions of documentary and its role in civic engagement. The study draws on qualitative research, based on interviews with the filmmaker, and interviews with 52 viewers in Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Colombia. This data is used to explore the idea of su…
Popular Culture Forms: Reality TV
Reality TV is a container for a range of diverse programs, series, formats, and events in which elements of documentary, talent shows, gameshows, talkshows, soap operas, melodramas, and sports mix together to produce subgenres. Reality TV can be broadly defined into two intergeneric spaces that draw on various subvariants of other genres across fact, drama, and entertainment; these definitions include the “world space” of reality TV set in real‐w…
Live reality television: Care structures within the production and reception of talent shows
This article focuses on production and reception practices for live reality television using critical theory and empirical research to question how producers and audiences co-create and limit live experiences. The concept of care structures is used to make visible hidden labour in the creation of mood, in particular audiences as participants in the management of live experiences. In the case of Got to Dance, there was a play off between the value…
Sociology (32 works) · Media studies (27 works) · Political science (19 works) · Art (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Media Studies and Communication (13 works) · Advertising (12 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (11 works)