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BCMCR New Directions in Media and Cultural Research
Series Editors: Oliver Carter, Kirsten Forkert, Nicholas Gebhardt and Dima Saber.
The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research’s ‘New Directions’ book series aims to advance research and teaching in the broad range of media and cultural studies and to serve as the focal point for a community of scholars who are committed to critical inquiry and collaborative practice. Books in the series engage with developments in the field, showing how new theoretical approaches have impacted on research within both media and cultural studies and other related disciplines. Each volume will focus on a specific theme or issue, as well as exploring broader processes of social and cultural transformation. The series is committed to producing distinctive titles that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and question existing paradigms, including innovative scholarship in areas such as the creative industries; media history, heritage and archives; games studies; gender and sexuality; screen cultures; jazz and popular music studies; media and conflict; songwriting studies; and critical theory. The editors are also keen to encourage authors to experiment with non-standard approaches to academic writing.
For more information about the series or to submit a proposal please contact the series editor:
Nicholas Gebhardt: [email protected]
To propose a manuscript please send a completed Author/Editor Questionnaire. The form can be downloaded from Publish with Us page.
Editorial Board
Joanna Garde-Hansen, University of Warwick
Paul Long, Monash University
John Mercer, Birmingham City University
Karen Patel, Birmingham City University
Annette Naudin, Birmingham City University
Sean Sobers, University of the West of England
Eduardo Vincente, University of Sao Paolo
Tony Whyton, Birmingham City University
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Media Materialities
Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning
Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats materiality and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured transformed and redefined through changing social cultural and technological values.
Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film board games maps videogames cassette tapes transistor radios and Twitter amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.
We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media culture and society.

Nuclear Gaia
Media Archives of Planetary Harm
Describes the transformations we have witnessed due to the development of nuclear science and technology accelerating policies interdependent on energy and military procedures that have led us to make a provocative claim that in many respects planet Earth is getting closer to the embodiment of the project we call Nuclear Gaia.
The book examines media archives and online platforms that recover data and memory and shape community knowledge of nuclear events from the distant and nearer past. These are the pieces of evidence that we are on the eve of creating new forms of social justice carried out by open-source investigations (OSINT) groups independent researchers artists media makers activists local communities and civic groups.
Thus analysing nuclear processes and their social and environmental consequences is no longer the exclusive domain of experts scientists politicians and the military. The authors hope that such communities’ practices and decolonial discourses combined with the critiques within our methodology as postnuclear media studies can also change the fate of nuclear industry victims by creating media space to discuss and regain justice as socially sanctioned and shared rules for understanding and using nuclear energy both in past and the future.

Popular Music Ethnographies
Practices, Places and Identities
This edited collection offers evocative ways into a range of fascinating worlds of popular music from the Ecuadorian indie scene to Chinese rock. In exploring the experiences of musicians fans industry professionals and academics the rich complexity of popular music is brought to life through ethnography as an immersive approach to undertaking and communicating research.
Experimenting with ethnography through the joys and tribulations of musical production fandom and scholarship these collated studies critically consider what it means to be a popular music ethnographer and to take an ethnographic approach to studying popular music.
Alongside these chapters musicians venue owners music writers live music photographers and fans add their voices and experience in the form of shorter vignettes ordering the content into three overlapping themes: practices; places; and identities.

Encountering the Plague
Humanities Takes on the Pandemic
This edited collection features fourteen newly commissioned articles each of which responds to the theme of plague from different disciplinary perspectives. Contributors focus on the effects of COVID-19 on everyday life drawing also on insights from different historical experiences of plague as a way of exploring human responses to epidemics past and present.
Each chapter opens with a different illustration that serves as a source for subsequent discussion enabling readers to make connections between everyday objects experiences and broader critical debates about plague and its impact on humanity. Thought-provoking commentaries stem from a variety of humanities disciplines including archaeology electronic literature history linguistics media and cultural studies and musicology.
Encountering the Plague explores ways in which humanities research can play a meaningful role in key social and political debates and provides compelling examples of how the past can inform our understanding of the present.

Media Materialities
Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning
Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats materiality and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured transformed and redefined through changing social cultural and technological values.
Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film board games maps videogames cassette tapes transistor radios and Twitter amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.
We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media culture and society.

Under the Counter
Britain’s Trade in Hardcore Pornographic 8mm Films
Prior to 2000 it was a criminal offence to sell hardcore pornography in Britain. Despite this there was a thriving alternative economy producing and distributing such material “under the counter” of Soho’s bookshops and via mail-order. British entrepreneurs circumvented obscenity laws to satisfy the demand for uncensored adult films and profit from their enterprise with the corrupt Obscene Publications Squad permitting them to trade.
By the late 1960s Britain had developed an international reputation for producing ‘rollers’ short films distributed on 8mm which were smuggled out of Britain for sale in Western Europe. Following an exposé by Britain’s tabloid press a crackdown on police corruption and several high-profile obscenity trials the trade was all but decimated with pornography smuggled in from Europe dominating the market.
Under the Counter is the first book of its kind to investigate Britain’s trade in illicit pornographic 8mm film. Drawing on extensive archival research including the use of legal records police files media reportage and interviews with those who were involved in the business Under the Counter tells the story of Britain’s trade in 8mm hardcore pornographic films and its regulation incorporating ideas from cultural studies political economy history and criminology.
Under the Counter is a scholarly monograph that will be of interest to researchers across a wide range of disciplines and will be of use to students at undergraduate Masters level and PhD.
The book will be of particular relevance to students and researchers interested in the study of pornography sexual cultures illicit media enterprise and entrepreneurship but also those with an interest in film production and distribution particularly within a British context. The theoretical frameworks that underpin the book mean that researchers with an interest in the creative industries will be able to make use of it and the book makes a contribution to media and cultural history.
It is suitable for use on university courses relating to these specific areas specifically media and communication film studies creative industries and potentially on criminology or socio-legal studies given the books attention to obscenity law and regulation of illicit practices.

The Swedish Porn Scene
Exhibition Contexts, 8mm Pornography and the Sex Film
This book presents a close look at the golden age of Swedish pornography in the 1970s with a specific focus on pornographic films screened in Malmö between 1971 and 1976. How Mariah Larsson asks was that one small city’s embrace of the era’s sexual liberation both representative and unique in relation to the rest of Sweden?
Combining historical case studies with comprehensive analyses of advertisements critical responses and censorship records Larsson deconstructs the complexities and paradoxes of the Swedish porn scene. Looking as closely at the exhibition spaces where porn was seen as at the productions themselves and their audiences Larsson reveals the conditions and social changes that allowed pornography in Sweden to flourish in the period.