Dr Lisa Taylor

My story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up there in the 1970s, my fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. My proximate, unknown father was a potent figure I would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here I offer a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot I explore, I draw on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to my own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to my return in 2015 as a researcher, I use autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. I chart how the methodologies I used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of my home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.

This article attributes the popularity of lifestyle to the contemporary shift from civic to consumer culture. At the local level, `lifestyle' is replacing the traditional `way of life'. The media, culture and leisure industries have a vested economic interest in encouraging the transition to lifestyle — hence the increased popularity of lifestyle programming in British primetime television. Since the mid-1990s, however, garden lifestyle media products have multiplied alongside a concomitant growth in consumer spending on garden merchandise. This article analyses the `ordinari-ization' strategies garden lifestyle programmes use to urge ordinary gardeners to invest in lifestyle projects. Viewers witness the embrace of more ordinary subjects and garden experts are `personalityinterpreters', translating lifestyle ideas from the symbolic repertoires offered by consumer culture.

This textbook provides students with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field of media studies. Written by two highly experienced lecturers, the volume covers media texts, media institutions and audiences and the media.

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.

David Hockney is one of Britain’s most popular living artists. His one-man show ‘A Bigger Picture’ opened in Spring 2012 at the RCA to a record number of visitors. Hockney’s decision to illuminate a relatively unknown corner of Britain, the Wolds of East Yorkshire, prompted a mixed critical response. This article however, is focused on findings from an empirical study based on how people from Yorkshire respond to Hockney’s suite of works. Concerned to chart the source and fluidity of the agency the people of the study gave to their engagements with Hockney, the piece draws on Alfred’s Gell’s notion of ‘art-like relations’ as a means of identifying what people respond to in his landscapes. Concerned with representational depictions of place in Hockney’s work the piece shows that people used Hockney to transform pejorative associations of the North. The gallery and the home as consumption sites were considered using a more-than-representational approach; this enabled a consideration of affective, embodied and routine practices of response beyond the visual. The study shows that the home provided a more relaxed, intimate space for engagement, where framed prints enabled people to reclaim Hockney’s landscapes almost as a form of kinship.

Geographically located at the heart of Carpetvillage in West Yorkshire, Carpetmakers had once been a thriving manufacturer of fine woven carpets since the late 1880s. From my own experience of growing up there in the 1970s, its inhabitants had held a sense of ‘communal being-ness’ through the shared experience of living there and of making carpets. After the factory was closed, Carpet Mill was demolished in 2002, leaving a void where there had once been a handsome Victorian building. Interested in responses to architectural, spatial, and sensuous change in an ex-industrial landscape, this article asks: what were the subjective consequences for the affective ties that hold together an ex-industrial community? Using sensuous ethnographic mobile methods, the study draws on ex-Carpetmakers employees and local residents. The research found nostalgic memories of Carpetmakers as a paternalistic employer operating in a thriving and largely self-sufficient community. Photographs were collected from respondents, which chart a vast number of social clubs and events that offered an important dimension to the ‘way of life’ offered to workers in this ‘company village’. It found that while the importance of works buildings is acknowledged by writers on de-industrialization, missing from their accounts is an embodied analysis of how people interact in situ with landscapes of demolition. Respondents told of the emotional trauma of the demolition process, the effects of spatial change through the erasure of the village’s architectural past and the almost total decline of a community which, for them, no longer holds a sense of place. The decline in the social structures of an industrial community meant that ageing ex-workers and residents found it difficult to generate communal ties with newcomers to the village.

This article details the first event Commoners Choir performed: a singing and walking project, Magna Carta, about the rights of lay people to access land for leisure and recreation. Using original songs, the project conceives both singing and walking as political acts of protest and commemoration. Situated within new walking studies, it argues that 10 AQ1 the choir’s walking is embodied and politically ‘artful and wilful.. Drawing on radical walking collectives and practitioners from British psychogeography such as the Loiterers Resistance Movement, Wrights & Sites and Phil Smith , it explores how Magna Carta affected the choir as they connected, through song with the rural spaces where the choir 15 performed. Using a small-scale sample of interviews with choir members, the piece explores the experience of the Magna Carta project. To capture the subjective and reflexive nature of both the action of the protest and the psychogeographical response to space as an output, the article is written using a deliberately creative mélange of lyrics, histories, happenings, symbols and images to offer a ‘thickness of description of Magna Carta as a walking event.

Is the garden a consumption site where identities are constructed? Do gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned by class and gender? This book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities. Timely and original, it develops a new area within cultural studies while contributing to debates about lifestyle and lifestyle media, consumption, class and methodology. © Lisa Taylor 2008. All rights reserved.

Is the garden a consumption site where identities are constructed? Do gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned by class and gender? This book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities. With an examination of aesthetic dispositions as a symbolic mode of communication closely aligned to peoples’ identities and drawing on ethnographic data gathered from encounters with gardeners, this book maps a typology of gardening taste, revealing that gardening - how plants are chosen, planted and cared for - is a classed and gendered practice manifested in specific types of visual aesthetics. This timely and original book develops a new area within cultural studies while contributing to debates about lifestyle and lifestyle media, consumption, class and methodology. A must read for anybody concerned with or intrigued by the cultural construction of identification practices.

Is the garden a consumption site where identities are constructed? Do gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned by class and gender? This book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities. With an examination of aesthetic dispositions as a symbolic mode of communication closely aligned to peoples' identities and drawing on ethnographic data gathered from encounters with gardeners, this book maps a typology of gardening taste, revealing that gardening - how plants are chosen, planted and cared for - is a classed and gendered practice manifested in specific types of visual aesthetics. This timely and original book develops a new area within cultural studies while contributing to debates about lifestyle and lifestyle media, consumption, class and methodology. A must read for anybody concerned with or intrigued by the cultural construction of identification practices.

Do gardeners make aesthetic choices according to how they are positioned by class and gender? This book presents the first scholarly analysis of the relationship between media interest in gardening and cultural identities.

Drawing on autobiographical memories of the influence of the Women’s Liberation Movement, this article discusses feminist etchings made for my final undergraduate show. Etching, historically related to satire, was deliberately chosen to mock the disparaging treatment of the female artist. The article offers both an experiential and a contextual discussion of the atmosphere of social activism, political activity and consciousness-raising of the WLM as well as the journalism and feminist art history scholarship which informed my practice. Further, the article evaluates the potential naivety of my feminist strategy of ‘body art’, as it risked being seen as conventional sexually explicit.

The polarised Leave/Remain positions offered by Brexit hampered opportunities for Britons to articulate the complexity of their affective political allegiances. Turning our focus on Grayson Perry: Divided Britain (2017, C4, Swan Films), we argue that Perry’s role as artist-ethnographer enabled an exploration ‘from below’ of the tensions occluded by deliberative democratic debate in febrile post-Brexit Britain. Intervening in a conjuncture of which Brexit was symptomatic, Perry’s arts documentary with Channel 4 provided the space to articulate newly configured affective and political affiliations in terms both of Britain as place and Britishness as identity. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic politics, we argue the programme provided a space of confrontation for groups defined as polarised ‘camps’ to contest and debate through their emotional and symbolic differences which exposed the limitations of the ‘post-political’ formation. However, while the programme visualises Perry’s ‘left populist’ strategy of crafting two similar pots through ethnographic listening and interactions with Leave and Remain communities, we argue the focus on predominantly white communities ultimately offers a limited notion of what ‘a people’ with the potential to revitalise democracy in contemporary Britain could be.

Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this paper, we combine agnotology – the study of manufactured ignorance – with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5’s Britain’s Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject ‘welfare claimant’ in Britain have a spatial dimension, evident in repeated camera shots of derelict, deindustrialised, litter-strewn outside spaces and large sofas, overflowing ashtrays and dusty corners inside homes. We conclude that FWT’s representations serve two functions: firstly, they obscure the spatial inequalities inherent in austerity policies by reducing social problems to constructed social types and their places and ways of living and, secondly, they enable sets of socio-spatial assumptions that become unquestioned ways of reading and understanding disadvantaged and disadvantagised spaces of residence.

The Media and Place cluster brings together a group of researchers interested in exploring how media are used by people to interact with each other and the physical spaces they occupy. Based in the Media and Cultural Studies department at the Centre for Culture and the Arts, Leeds Beckett University, the team works with the public, scholars and practitioners in order to explore debates and creative activities about the significance of place.

Media representations of fat and weight play a central role in the circulation of weight stigma. However, the production practices involved have received little attention. This paper focuses on the editing techniques deployed in a UK reality television documentary series, On Benefits. Our analysis of cutaway shots suggests a quantitative and qualitative difference between an episode featuring “‘obese”’ people claiming welfare, compared to the rest in our sample. We examine the cutaways to show how weight stigma intersects with welfare stigma on the grounds of self-control. We conclude that images of bodies, food, and medical aides mobilize weight stigma to overdetermine welfare claimants as underserving while casting suspicion about the purpose of State welfare in the UK.

Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax – or ‘visual grammar’ – of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5’s documentary series On Benefits (2015-19), we conduct a Visual Grammar Analysis to argue that cutaway editing, which inserts camera shots of toilets, canine excrement and fly-tipping into programmes, undermines potentially sympathetic representations of poverty communicated via narrator voiceovers and/or verbal testimonies of participants. Our findings show that cutaway editing is a significant feature in the production of On Benefits and is oppositional to the articulated narrative. The research concludes that cutaway editing in FWT generates disgust towards the living places of benefits claimants, which is productive of a powerful visual grammar of spatial stigma

This article analyses innovative burial products linked to emergent modes of ‘eco’ death-styling. It focuses, specifically, on producers of sustainable coffins designed to prevent the environmental impacts of the dead and, instead, to make the corpse an agent of positive environmental renewal. Operating within the digital marketplace and presenting themselves as a green alternative to ‘industrial’ forms of bodily disposal, these producers offer novel funeral commodities to the ecologically responsible consumer contemplating death. We identify a tension, in the marketing discourses associated with these products, between a genuine concern with sustainability and complicity with a neoliberal ideology which sees ‘green consumerism’ and individualised ‘choices’ as the ‘solution’ to climate breakdown and ecological crisis. ‘Eco’ coffins provide, it is claimed, instruments for the management of post-mortem corporeality, extending neoliberal practices of biopolitical self-regulation into and after death. Similarly, the designers of these products position themselves as entrepreneurial agents disrupting the funeral market and transforming attitudes to death and our relation to nature. Although they offer a critique of the harms associated with the ‘conventional’ funeral industry, their ‘start-up’ ethos aligns them with the free-market orientation of Silicon Valley ideology. Although they effectively merge aesthetic appeal, innovative design and sustainability, eco coffins are commodities, proffered to ‘eco-sensitive’ consumers in the Global North, their production and circulation evidence of how ‘capitalism extracts value from domains that were previously not perceived as elements of the sphere of economic activity – social interactions, the body, life… from death and the dead.’

It is expected that the Covid-19 lockdown will have increased physical inactivity with negative impacts for older people, who are at greater risk of health complications from the virus. This paper draws on customer evaluation questionnaire of a Pilates class aimed at people aged over 50 years old, which transitioned from a studio setting to online classes via Zoom at the start of the lockdown in England. The paper aims to (i) evaluate the shift of exercise services to online and (ii) examine how engagement with online services has influenced people’s reaction to Covid-19 and unprecedented confinement to their homes. Our analysis shows that experiences of exercise in the home are dependent on prior exercise engagement, particularly a sense of progress and competency in exercise movements, trust in the instructor and socio-economic privileges that enable participants to love and appreciate their homes. This paper argues that online classes have had positive impact on participants’ ability to cope with lockdown: routine, structure and being seen by others all proved important well-being aspects.