We are pleased to announce the launch of the British Popular Culture(s) Network, with an inaugural annual conference taking place at Falmouth University, between 5-7th June 2025.
Britain has a vibrant heritage and history of popular culture, and a long tradition of cultural thinkers who have been active in both shaping and defining British popular culture.
The conference aims to renew this collaborative practice by inviting participation from those involved in all aspects of cultural scenes, practices and critical appreciation to nurture a vibrant third sector and generate new thinking.
The following registration options are available:
- Fully affiliated: £150
- Independent Researcher: £25
- Hourly paid/zero contract staff: Free
- PGR student: Free
- Falmouth University staff: Free
- Non presenting delegates: Free
Conference details
The conference is open to researchers, academics, PhD students, practitioners, artists, curators, archivists and activists working in and across all areas of British popular culture and cognate disciplines. Britain has a vibrant heritage and history of popular culture, and a long tradition of cultural thinkers who have linked spheres of popular culture together but also approached them as separate entities. Fundamental to a vibrant, diverse, and sustainable popular culture is active creative participation and critical thinking to change, contest, and renew. This conference continues this spirit, accepting contributions from those involved in all aspects of critical appreciation, cultural scenes and practices, and utilising various methodologies and multi/trans disciplinary frameworks. The aim of the conference is to create a space for participants to come together to share, discuss, and foster ideas and practices which challenge assumptions, focus research and generate new thinking.
British popular culture continues to experience extraordinary ideological and political provocations, whilst facing commercial and socio-economic pressures. These pressures and challenges have been amplified by the impact of the Covid pandemic and fourteen years of a hostile Conservative government. The conference takes as its premise that popular culture is an evolving, dynamic social and creative process involving the self, community, and wider social structures which circulate and navigate capitalism. At this pivotal moment the conference and network will build a community of connections across academia and the cultural industries, creating a third sector to support and sustain future work and collaborations through conferences, events, and research, amongst other activities.
Taking place in Falmouth, Cornwall, a site of importance at the intersection of popular cultures and education, the conference will work in partnership with the local creative industry to highlight and discuss challenges facing regional creative and cultural economies. A hope of the event is that the highlighting of the richness, uniqueness, solidarity and precarity of regional popular cultures and how they entwine with wider discourses across the British Isles will be taken up in different locales for future iterations of the conference.
1st British Popular Culture(s) Conference, 2025
- June 5-6 Falmouth University, Penryn
- June 7 - The Cornish Bank, Falmouth
We are honoured to have three keynote speakers for our inaugural conference; Dr Joy White, Dr Alice Pember, and our Public Keynote Speaker, Nathalie Olah, all of whom are vital voices in thinking through contemporary British culture.
Keynote Speakers
Nathalie Olah, author of Steal as much as you can (Repeater 2019); Look Again: Class (Tate Publishing, 2021) and Bad Taste (Dialogue, 2023)
Separating ‘pop’ from ‘the mass’: is it possible?
Abstract
The defense of pop culture often takes an uncritical view of the centralised media and conflates its output with the more organic expression of real communities. In the case of the latter, we are not consumers of culture, but participants. It is vitally important that we, as cultural critics and practitioners, remain conscious of this distinction, lest we become susceptible to the false characterisation of the ‘working’ or the ‘normal’ person, by which we are all then subsequently reduced to ‘the mass’.
Culture — by which I mean, music, art, dance, theatre and literature — has the capacity to unite and galvanize us against the dehumanizing tendencies of capitalism, but only if it becomes detached from the forms that are born of the capitalist mode.
In this talk, I will apply the theories of writers such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, but also more recently, Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh, to consider whether it is even possible to disentangle notions of ‘pop’ from mass-production; and if so, how?
Biography
Nathalie Olah is the author of three works of cultural criticism, Steal as much as you can (Repeater 2019); Look Again: Class (Tate Publishing, 2021) and Bad Taste (Dialogue, 2023). She has previously taught at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern, Switzerland and worked as a visiting lecturer at The Royal College of Art. She has written and co-produced radio documentaries for the BBC and her articles appear regularly in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, Tate Etc. and Tribune.
New Girls on the Block: The Politics of Music and Dance in Women’s New Social Realist Filmmaking
Abstract
In a recent wave of ‘new social realist’ films made by British women, the dancing girl has taken centre stage. In films like Fish Tank, American Honey, Rocks and Bird, representations of working-class girlhood are punctuated by exhilarating dance sequences, soundtracked by a range of popular musical forms, including EDM, country, grime, afrobeat, hip-hop and punk. Although the ‘aestheticization’ of new social realism (including its emphasis on dance and popular music) has been understood as part of a troubling detachment from the forms of class antagonism effected by traditional social realism, this talk follows Paul Dave’s redemptive analysis of the genre’s newly aestheticized register as a mechanism for actively encountering the neoliberal present. Focusing primarily on the musical sequences in recent films by Andrea Arnold, it examines the dialogue between the individual, the community and neoliberal biopolitics staged through the interplay of popular music and lived experience in these films. It is argued that, by exploring these wider social issues through subjective lens of individual girls and the music that they dance to, these films offer a dynamic and politically relevant engagement with the unrelenting effects of neoliberalism. By looking closely at the musical sequences in these films, this talk works to locate a space of counter-hegemonic politics within the audio-visual register of contemporary, girl-centred realism.
Biography
Alice Pember is an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research has been published in French Screen Studies, Modern and Contemporary France and Film-Philosophy journals. Her current work focuses on the intersecting affects and political implications of girlhood, dance and pop music in contemporary cinema. Her article ‘New Girls on the Block: Music and Dance as Spaces of Aesthetic Politics in Fish Tank (2009) and Rocks (2020)’ will be published in Beyond the Council Estate: Cinematic Space(s) of the Working-Class (Bloomsbury) in 2025. Her first monograph The Dancing Girl in Contemporary Cinema is forthcoming and will be published by Edinburgh University press in 2026.
Made in the Manor? Gentrification, Austerity & Black British Music
Abstract
Grime is a contemporary Black British musical genre with its roots in East London. From its early days as a niche practice articulating the experiences of young Black lives, it is now embedded in popular culture and has a worldwide audience. Newham, an outer East London borough, is the most ethnically diverse local authority in England and Wales and is a key location in the emergence of grime. For many years, young people in Newham have created a sense of place, belonging and identity through Black musical forms such as grime, UK rap and UK drill. However, the processes of gentrification, and the impact of austerity, limit possibilities in the use of public space (for some). At the same time, housing, low income and rising rents have a significant impact on who can create, and where creativity can happen. In this paper, I reflect on what happens to musical creativity and creative work in a newly gentrified local area.
Biography
Dr Joy White is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture during Covid and Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City. Joy has presented her work at a number of UK and international institutions including: The Post-Windrush Generation: Black British Voices of Resistance, University of Cambridge, Subcultures Network Conference Panel, University of Reading, The Place of Music, Loughborough University, Annual Black Studies Lecture, University of Nottingham, Stanford University Forum for African Studies, Urban Culture and Political Engagement, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 3rd International Research Conference on Cultural and Creative Industries University of Antwerp, Eastern Sociological Society, 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference, Hacettepe University. Her previous work includes Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise, one of the first books to foreground the socio-economic significance of grime music. Recent publications include Growing up under the influence: A sonic genealogy of Grime, and (with Jonathan Ilan) Ethnographer Soundclash: A UK rap and grime story. Joy has also written for The Quietus, The Conversation, Trench, Google Arts + Culture, Red Pepper and Prospect.
During the first two days, the conference will be held at our Penryn Campus.
On the final day, the conference will be held at the Cornish Bank in Falmouth.
Please find address details of both locations below
Address: Penryn Campus, Treliever Road, Penryn TR10 9FE
Address: The Cornish Bank, 34 Church St, Falmouth TR11 3EF
Further information
By rail: There are regular services to Truro from all major British cities. London Paddington in 4 hours, from Exeter, 2.5 hours. Change at Truro for regular branch line to Penryn in only 15 minutes and Falmouth in 20 minutes. The campus is just a short walk from Penryn station and there are also regular buses.
By Bus: Dedicated university buses (U1, U2, U3) from Truro, Redruth and Falmouth run every ten minutes throughout the day and the journey from Falmouth is approximately 15 minutes.
Long distance National Express coaches stop in Penryn.
By plane: Newquay airport is 40km away. There are direct flights from London Heathrow, Gatwick, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Manchester as well as various European cities; connecting flights are available to other destinations. Exeter Airport is just over 160 km away and well connected by train.
By road: Abacus and Falmouth Taxis (01326 212141) offer short journeys and airport transfers.
The Penryn Campus postcode is TR10 9FE. There is a large car park on campus, with a pay on exit (purchase from the Pay Stations before exiting) parking scheme. The cost of parking is £6 per day. Disabled delegates park free.
Falmouth and Penryn have a wealth of hotels and guest houses. In Falmouth, the University has partner rates for events with hotels including The Greenbank – where Kenneth Graham wrote some of The Wind in the Willows. Other large hotels include Falmouth Hotel, St Michael’s, offering a competitive rate for their location and the time of year. There are many smaller hotels, guest houses, B&Bs and AirBnBs in Falmouth and Penryn.
Book your accommodation directly with the hotels. If you decide to use one offering partner rates (listed below) inform them you will be attending a conference at Falmouth University, which will give you the corporate rate. Copy in Michelle Glover, michelle.glover@falmouth.ac.uk or provide her contact details in your booking request, and Michelle will confirm your conference attendance with the hotel.
Details of hotels offering partner rates can be found below:
The Greenbank Hotel, Single Rate: £110 per night, The Greenbank Hotel, Harbourside, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 2SR, reception@greenbank-hot
We want to use the conference as an opportunity to document culture through individual displays of cultural allegiances! Bring your badges, tote bags, or any other items which articulate your cultural tastes!
On the Thursday evening there is a Heavy Friends Vinyl Night at a local microbrewery in Penryn, The Verdant Taproom. Pizza is included in the registration fee. The theme of Vinyl Night is of course, British music, and delegates will have the opportunity to play 3 tracks of their choice. The organising committee will supply a selection of vinyl for you to choose from on the night, but we encourage delegates to bring their own selection!
Horses on the Beach (Cornish Bank, Ticketed)
Dub in the Pub (Touc Inn, Free)
Saturday is the public facing day which aims to bring academia (back) into popular spaces of critical support, collaboration and fandom, with pizza, conversation and music. We close the conference with live music! Included in the price of the registration fee is a ticket for Horses of the Beach, whose band members studied music at Falmouth University, and who are playing at the Cornish Bank in the evening. If you wish to attend the gig, please select the option of a ticket when you register. For those who don’t want to see the band but rather hang out at the venue in the evening, downstairs at the Cornish Bank there is Dub in the Pub in the Touc Inn which is free to all.