Working in New Media final report (July 2007)

Rosalind Gill

 Senior Lecturer in Gender Theory & Gender Studies

Contact details: Room B508, Tel:0207 955 6204, Fax:0207 955 6408, r.c.gill@lse.ac.uk
More information: LSE Experts' entry
Office hours: 10.30-12.30 Mondays 

Profile

Rosalind Gill is a senior lecturer in Gender Theory based in the Gender Institute and the Sociology department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been at the LSE since 1997, and previously worked at Brunel University and Goldsmiths College. Her work is at the intersection of psychosocial studies, media and cultural studies, and gender studies.

Ros did her PhD in the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at Loughborough University, supervised by Michael Billig. Her thesis explored constructions of class, 'race' and gender on pop music radio and analysed DJ talk along with interviews with broadcasters at the BBC and two commercial (independent) stations. Ros coined the term 'new sexism' to capture the flexibility of broadcasters' sexism in a post-feminist context in which direct expressions of prejudice were taboo, yet in which broadcasters sought to justify men's domination of the airwaves. This work has been extensively cited and articles about it have been reprinted in several edited collections, and translated into Turkish, German and Portuguese.

In 2000 Ros set up the MSc in Gender and Media, in collaboration with the newly established Media & Communications department at LSE. She continues to direct this programme, teaching courses on gender and media representation (GI 403) and cultural constructions of the body (GI 408). Her book Gender and the Media was published by Polity Press in November 2006. Read the preface here.

Research interests

Ros's current interests fall under four broad headings

* Postfeminist media culture and young women's lives

In December 2006, Ros co-edited with Jane Arthurs a special issue of the journal Feminist Media Studies on the theme of New Femininities. Read the introduction here. This brought together a number of papers from the ESRC Research Seminar series of the same name -- including Kathleen Rowe Carlin's analysis of the film Thirteen, Michelle Lazar's discussion of globalised representations of 'power femininity', and Sue Jackson's discussion of postfeminist subjectivities in the New Zealand drama Street Girl. Ros's own article, co-written with Elena Herdieckerhoff, examined contemporary chick lit as an expression of postfeminism, exploring how it differs from earlier popular romances. Read it here.

New Femininities: An International Conference took place on 25 and 26 January 2007 at the British library and LSE, with the a public lecture by Angela McRobbie on 'Illegible rage and postfeminist disorders', presentations by Stacy Gillis, Hilary Radner, Claire Charles and many others, and screenings by new women filmmakers from around the world.

Ros continues her interest in film and media representations of gender, with a specific focus on elaborating a notion of postfeminism as a new and significant sensibility, intimately connected to neoliberalism. An article about this will be published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies in early 2007. Ros is also coordinating a symposium on this theme at the Cultural Studies Now conference in London in July 2007.

Questions about what has been called 'the sexualisation of culture ' are central to this discussion, and Ros's work has been important in interrogating the shift from representations of women as passive sex objects, to their construction as active, desiring (hetero)sexual subjects, mobilising the Foucaultian notion of subjectification to analyse the power relations involved. In 'Supersexualize me!' (to appear in Attwood et al's collection Mainstreaming Sex- in press) Ros looks at the construction of the figure of the 'midriff' in advertising. In 'Beyond sexualisation' (to appear in Sexualities 2008) she examines the rise of 'queer chic' in contemporary adverts.

This work - like all Ros's work - is also concerned with theorising subjectivity. Ros recently published an article about this in the European Journal of Women's Studies, (read it here) and, with Christina Scharff, is editing a special section of Feminist Theory about the dilemmas and difficulties of theorising agency.

*Technology, social relations, and precarious labour

Since working alongside Steve Woolgar, Keith Grint and Christine Hine at at the Centre for Innovation Culture and Technology (CRICT) in the early 1990s, Ros has maintained a powerful research interest in new technology. She is editor of The Gender-Technology Relation ,Taylor & Francis, 1995, with Keith Grint, and has also written a number of articles about women on the web. One strand of this interest relates to questions about digital divisions, empowerment, violence and trafficking. In 2003, Ros was selected by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women as the European expert on a five-member panel concerned with information and communication technologies and addressed more than 1000 delegates at the UN in New York.

The other strand of interest in technology relates to ongoing research concerned with the experiences of people working in new media/cultural industries occupations e.g. web design, multimedia production, animation, etc. Ros has worked on three research projects in this field in the last few years. In 1999/2000, she headed up a six country study of working practices in the electronic arts, funded by the European commission, DGV. An important paper which reported on the findings of that society was published in Information, Communication & Society in 2002. (read it here). The same year Ros made a BBC documentary entitled Brave New Work which made a number of sociological arguments about the transformation of work in the information society/late capitalism/network society accessible for a general audience.

While Ros's work is animated by interests in debates about precariousness, insecurity, the transformation of work, precarity, networks and immaterial labour, it's main contribution is in doing empirical research in these fields and through these debates. Since 2005, Ros has been working with Andy Pratt and Volker Spelthann on a research project concerned with work in 3 different fields of new media: web design, film post-production and computer games. This research will be presented at the British Sociological Association conference in London in April 2007. In the same time frame Ros has been carrying out work for the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam interviewing freelance new media workers about their lives. The report of this work: 'Technobohemians or the new cybertariat?' will be published as a NetworkNotebook in Spring 2007.

*Men and masculinities

Ros has a long-standing interest in men and masculinities and has written extensively about recent cultural shifts in representations of masculinity -- e.g. constructions of new man, new lad and metrosexual. (Read genealogy article here) In 2000, Ros scripted a BBC documentary which looked critically at the notion that men were 'in crisis'. The following year she produced a multimedia educational package about masculine identities for a consortium of European and North American universities.

In the late 1990s Ros worked with Karen Henwood and Carl Mclean on a project about young men's embodied identities. The research featured interviews with 140 men in the UK, and Ros (together with Merryn Smith) carried out a smaller follow-up study in Sydney in 2003. Ros has written up articles about men's responses to idealised, eroticised imagery, and has also analysed their 'body talk' (read Body & Society article here). In a forthcoming book chapter in a collection about Weighty Issues she questions whether a singular notion of 'pressure' is useful for understanding the relationship between changing regimes of representation and men's subjective experiences.

Discourse, narrative, and methods (in the broadest sense)

Ros has enduring interests in discourse analysis and in the growth of interest in the 'storied' nature of social life through the development of narrative research. Her PhD research used a discourse analytic approach, and she has subsequently written many introductions to the subject. She has long established links with the the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, and has co-run the centre's postgraduate narrative research seminars for the last five years. Ros is currently writing a book entitled Discourse, Narrative and Representation, which will be published in late 2007/early 2008.

Media work

Ros has written articles for The Guardian, the Times Higher, and various magazines. She is called on widely as an expert commentator in the media, and has recently appeared on Thinking Aloud and Woman’s Hour. She has written and presented two documentaries in the BBC's Analysis series, one concerned with changing masculinities, and the other with new forms of work biography.

Current teaching

I have developed Gender and Media Representation as a WebCT course, working with the Centre for Learning and Teaching and assisted by Elisabeth Kelan. The aim of this is to develop a multimedia environment including lecture notes, key readings, Internet links, images and clips from film and video.  Ros and Elisabeth are also making a short educational film about women in journalism and gendered newsroom cultures and are keen to explore and develop the way that new technologies and media can be used in education.

GI400: Gender Theories in the Modern World (convener)

GI403: Gender & The Media (convener)

GI408: Cultural Constructions of the Body (convener)

Contributions to 

• Theories and concepts of media and communication
• Culture and Society
• Gender and Society

Research Students

I am currently supervising the following:

Christina Scharff

Youth, feminism and the media

 

Rebekah Wilson

A Name of One's Own? Women's Experiences of Marital Naming

 

Finding, Deborah

Taking Back The Night? Sexual violence, female artists and the music industry

 

Franchi, Marina

Social Representation in Families

 

Jensen, Tracey

An exploration of Supernanny and the growth of parenting advice within confessional media
 

Gooch, Rebecca

Regulation Compliance in British Television

Fistikaki, Helen

Awarded PhDs

Karen Throsby: When IVF Fails (awarded May 2002)

Roisin Ryan-Flood: Disruptive (M)Others: lesbian parenting in Sweden and Ireland (awarded January 2004)

Roona Simpson: Contemporary Spinsterhood in Britain: gender, partnership status and social change (awarded May 2005)

Elisabeth Kelan Binary Logic? Doing Gender in Information Communication Technology Work (awarded March 2006)

I have examined 15 PhD theses throughout the UK.

Selected publications

Working in New Media final report (pdf) July 2007

This project was set up in April 2005 as a joint initiative between the Gender Institute, LSE, the Institute for Network Cultures and the Institute voor Interactieve Media, Amsterdam. Rosalind Gill collaborated with Geert Lovink and Danielle von Diemen in a study of working practices in new media, including web design, animation and electronic arts. The results of this research help to make visible the experiences of a growing number of new media workers and will contribute to policies designed to support and enhance their experience.

Rosalind Gill, Karen Henwood, and Carl McLean Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity
Body and Society 2005 11: 37-62

Ros Gill and Karen Throsby, '"It’s Different for Men" Masculinity and IVF' Men and Masculinities, 2004,  Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 330-348, Sage  http://jmm.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/4/330

 

Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-Based New Media Work in Europe (PDF)

Information, Communication and Society, 1 January 2002, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 70-89(20), Routledge

From sexual objectification to sexual subjectification: The resexualisation of women's bodies in the media (PDF)

Power and the Production of Subjects: a Genealogy of the New Man and the New Lad (PDF)

LSE Fathom Seminar Series -Rethinking Masculinity: Men and Their Bodies

Honours, prizes and awards

Loughborough University PhD scholarship prize, 1986

Winner of BRIEF Young Researcher Award, 1994, Brunel University

Pearce Award for Innovation and Quality in Teaching, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1997

Research grants and awards from the following bodies: Unilever Research, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and the European Commission.

In 2003, Dr Gill was nominated by the British government as an expert on women, media and information and communication technologies to serve on the United Nations Commission for the Status of Women (UNCSW). This nomination was accepted by the UN and she addressed the Assembly in March 2003 as the European expert, one of only five experts internationally, with a paper on Participation and access of women to the media and information technologies, and their impact on and use as an instrument for the advancement and empowerment of women

Research Awards

ESRC seminar series - New Femininities, 

E-clusters in the e-society: the case of the digital content industry

Working practices in new media.

Recent and forthcoming conferences

A Decade of Web Design, Amsterdam, January 21-22, 2005 http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/decade1stannounce/view

‘Baring All’ Meccsa Seminar, Goldsmiths College, April 19th, 2005
http://www.meccsa.org.uk/wmsn/openseminar20050419.html

International Society for Theoretical Psychology, Cape Town, June 20 -- 24th, 2005

^