[ICTs-and-Society] CAMRI Seminar (March 5): Stephen Harper on Media Studies Beyond the Left

[Christian Fuchs]

Wednesday, March 5, 2014, 14:00-16:00
Stephen Harper (University of Portsmouth)
University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, room A6.08
Did Somebody Say ‘Neoliberalism’?: Media Studies Beyond the Left

Registration at latest until Monday, March 3, per e-mail to 
christian.fuchs at uti.at

Beginning with a wide-ranging critique of left-liberal media (and 
left-liberal media critics’) perspectives on a range of social and 
political topics – including ‘humanitarian intervention’, mental 
distress, immigration and ‘the environment’ – this talk argues for the 
necessity of Marxism for media criticism. The second part of the talk 
offers a more focused interrogation of certain discursive themes in 
contemporary Media and Cultural Studies, with a particular focus on the 
now hegemonic, yet problematic category of ‘neoliberalism’. Overall, 
this ‘big picture’ talk aims to contribute to a reassessment of the 
explanatory power and theoretical adequacy of some of the prevailing 
postulates of left-liberal Media Studies.

Stephen Harper is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of 
Portsmouth. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book 
chapters on British television drama and documentary, media and war, and 
the mediation of mental illness, as well as the single-authored books 
Madness, Power and the Media (Palgrave, 2009) and Beyond the Left: The 
Communist Critique of the Media (Zero, 2012).