The British Popular Culture(s) Network is pleased to announce its next conference taking place, 9-11 July 2026, Falmouth, Cornwall, UK.
Following the success of this year’s inaugural conference, we want to continue fostering the breadth of scope in topics and speakers by creating an inclusive space for participants to come together to share, discuss, and develop ideas and practices which challenge assumptions, focus research and generate new thinking. 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 and utilising various methodologies and multi/trans disciplinary frameworks.
There will again be a public-facing day hosted by The Cornish Bank, a grassroots music venue and community arts space in Falmouth. Confirmed participants are Cornish filmmaker BAFTA Award winning, Mark Jenkin director of Bait (2019), Enys Men (2022) and forthcoming Rose of Nevada (2025), and Welsh-Cornish musician and Welsh music prize winner, Gwenno, whose output includes, Cornish language album Tresor (2022) and Y Dydd Olaf (2014) and Le Kov (2018).
We have been approached by Intellect Publishing with regards to a ‘Handbook on British Popular Culture(s)’ and we will be inviting selected papers delivered at this year’s and the 2026 conference to be included in the handbook.
We invite individual abstracts for papers, performances, spoken word pieces, and short films (no longer than 20 minutes in length), as well as themed panels (no longer than 60 minutes in length). We also welcome ideas for further creative content such as exhibitions and workshops that can be integrated into the event through conversations with the conference team.
Possible areas of interest to include, but not limited to:
- Advertising
- Architecture
- Art
- Board Games and Pastimes
- Comedy
- Comics
- Costume
- Dance
- Design
- Fashion
- Film
- Illustration
- Journalism
- Literature
- Media
- Music
- Performance
- Poetry
- Pubs
- Sport
- Television
- Video Games
- Festivals and Events
- Politics and popular culture
- Cultural policy
- Popular culture and democracy
- Popular culture and social justice
- Popular culture and environmental crisis
- Popular Culture and inequality
- Pedagogies of Popular Culture
- Popular Culture and the REF
- Popular Culture in/and Education
- Gender, class, sexuality, race
- Alternative scenes and practices, DIY culture.
- Popular culture industries
- Emerging modes
- Regional, local, and national cultural and creative economies
- National popular culture in a global context
- Space, place, tourism
- Consumerism
- Capitalism, Co-option and Commodification
- Colonial and postcolonialism
- Precarity and Sustainability
- Activism
- Celebrity
- Celebrity Activism and Dissent
- Archives, curation, programming
- Cultural thinkers
- Digitalisation and digital technologies
- AI and technological impacts
- The Popularisation of Folk Cultures
Please submit an abstract no longer than 300 words, five keywords and a short bio (including contact details) to, britishpopularculture@falmouth.ac.uk by 9 January 2026 .
All enquiries to be directed to the British Popular Culture email address.
Confirmed speakers for 2026
We are happy to announce Jez Collins, founder and director of the Birmingham Music Archive C.I.C, Professor Abigail Gardner, University of Gloucestershire and Professor Oli Mould, Royal Holloway University of London, will be joining the conference this year.
Jez Collins is the founder and director of the Birmingham Music Archive C.I.C., a creative and cultural arts organisation that captures, documents and celebrates the music history, heritage and culture of Birmingham and its communities through a range of diverse and engaging projects. He is also founder of Atticus Creative & Cultural Consultancy, a cultural and creative consultancy that help develops cultural, creative, community and place-making strategies for those working in the built environment sector. In addition, Jez is a co-Director of Un-Convention C.I.C., a global grassroots music network that helps build sustainable music infrastructures and a widely published academic and public speaker. Jez sits on the Board for Soul City Arts and Digbeth Improvement District and he is a member of Bearwood Promoters in the Black Country, a group of voluntary music lovers who programme live music on a Victorian Bandstand.
Professor Abigail Gardner is Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Gloucestershire’s School of Creative Arts. She researches popular music, gender, and ageing, and her latest book moved into Sound Studies. Listening, Belonging and Memory (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently researching for PJ Harvey: Place, Memory and the Magic of Dorset (Cambridge University Press). Other publications include Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2019), PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (2015) and, with Ros Jennings, Aging and Popular Music in Europe (2019) and Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (2012). She is leading a joint UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) funded project called Sound, Environment and Ageing: Bringing the Outside into Care Homes and has Erasmus + European projects with the most recent being a music and memory project called Mapping the Music of Migration. She was editor in chief of the International Association of Popular Music Journal 2022 - 2025.
Oli Mould is a professor of human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of four books including Against Creativity (2018), Seven Ethics Against Capitalism (2021) and the forthcoming Postcapitalist Cities (2026). His research focus on radical politics, urban life, mutual aid and activism.
Oli's Talk
Creativity is a bad concept. We're all familiar with a particular rendition of creativity as a way to better ourselves and our economies, but this version has stifled what it means to be actually creative. In this talk, we will explore why being creative under contemporary capitalism is bad, and instead engages with more recalcitrant ways of being creative: specifically through psychedelic experiences (broadly defined). Under capitalism, creativity is instrumentalised; it is reduced to productivity, innovation, and market value. Instead, I want to advocate for a psychedelic version of creativity – one that popular culture has provided for us in many versions throughout the decades – may resist enclosure by rejecting individualism, embracing ambiguity, and fostering non-exploitative forms of connection and meaning-making. In doing so, it challenges the neoliberal appropriation of the ‘creative subject’ and opens space for alternative imaginaries of art, labour, and life, rooted in mutuality, care, and a deep material and ecological consciousness. Psychedelic experience becomes, here, not an escape, but a politicised reorientation: a means of seeing, sensing, and creating otherwise.