British Popular Culture(s) Conference 2026

• Thursday 9th July 2026
• 9am – 9.30am, SoFT Building Atrium 
• Arrival/Registration 

SoFT Cinema, Welcome and Keynote 1 

Welcome: 9.30 – 9.45 

Keynote 1:  9.45 – 10.45am 

• Jez Collins, Birmingham Music Archive. Q&A hosted by Professor Neil Fox  

 

Morning Break: 10.45 – 11.15am, SoFT Atrium  

 

Session 1: 11.15am – 12.30, Daphne Du Maurier (DM) Building 

Panel 1A: Popular Culture in the Archives 

Chair: TBC 

• Melanie Cox ‘Exploring Radical Television in Early Channel 4’ 
• Matt Melia ‘Opening The Ben Kelly Archive at Kingston University’ 
• Tyshia Murphy ‘Recontextualizing the David Webb Collection: Exploring Audiovisual Archival Practices’ 

Panel 1B: Objects of Space and Place 

Chair: TBC

• Richard Elliott ‘‘Chillingham Cattle, Bamburgh Castle, Fawdon Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles’: Specificity, Memory and Community in a North-East English Song’ 
• Pamela Brook ‘Parachutes, Escape Maps, Monopoly and Wedding Dresses’ 
• Samidha Vedabala ‘From Ravi Shankar to the Present: The Sitar’s Journey in British Popular Culture’ 

Panel 1C: Empowerment and Female Voices 

Chair: Odry Bastianello ‘Spellbound: Reading Siouxsie Sioux as Shamaness’ 

• Liza Betts ‘‘One is not born but rather becomes a misandrist’: Negotiating contemporary feminist encounters from Gisèle Pelicot to Sabrina Carpenter’ 
• Maire Tracey/Sofia Theodosiadou ‘Female Millennial Voices in British Documentary: Emergence of a New Perspective?’ 

 

Lunch: 12.30 – 13.15 pm, Daphne Du Maurier (DM Building) 

 

Session 2: 13.15 – 14.30pm 

Panel 2A: The Legacies of the 1970s 

Chair: TBC

• Russ Bestley ‘DOING It Themselves: The Home-Made Graphics of Punk Devotees’ 
• Kat Flint-Nicol ‘Re-evaluating Paul Weller through fan histories: or, confessions of a melancholic Style Council fan’ 
• Simon Poole ‘“Black Mass and that sort of Jazz” The 1970s British Counter Culture in Horror Cinema’ 

Panel 2B: Collaboration and Co-creation in Communities and Collectives  

Chair: TBC

• Vicki Fong/ David Thomas ‘Do and Understand Rethinking the impact of participation via physical and digital mediums’ 
• Sarah Levinsky ‘Who Gets to Be Heard? Homelessness, Cocreation, and the Politics of Popular Performance’ 
• Simon Strange ‘Creative Spheres: collective creativity in popular music scenes’ 

Panel 2C: Visions of London 

Chair: TBC

• Vivienne Gaskin ‘The Re-Birth of the Cultural Playground: ICA Club Nights 1997-2006’ 
• Karen Smith ‘Club, Screen and Space: 1980s Goth, Scala Cinema and the Batcave’ 
• Karen Wilkes ‘Structures of feeling and the crafting of nostalgia in popular culture aesthetics of London’ 

 

Workshop: 14.00 - 16.00, AIR Sandpit 

Games & British Popular Culture(s) - A Practice Research Workshop 

Presented by the British Popular Culture(s) Network and Falmouth University’s Games Academy, this workshop – hosted by BPC Early Career Leads Rosie Gailor  - uses popular games, created through practice research to look at how PR can contribute to cultural research. The session is open to all but will be part-tailored towards those at early career/stage of their academic journey, in dialogue with and support from more established practitioners and scholars. Despite the lens of games, this session will be relevant to all interested in practice research in various fields and how it engages with popular culture research contexts.  

 

Session 3: 14.30pm – 15.45pm 

Panel 3A: From Blitz Club to Companies: Art School, Subcultural Capital and the 1980s Creative Economy 

Chair: TBC

• Panel Presentation: Nathaniel Weiner/Kevin Quinn/Jake Hawkes/Graham Ball  

Panel 3B: Shaping Culture: Theorising Culture 

Chair: TBC

• Melanie Anderson ‘Popular Culture on Trial: Tabloid Intrusion and the Limits of British Press Regulation’ 
• Cynthia Dong ‘Towards a Queer Utopia? SOPHIE, Opacity, and the Afterlives of Trans Visibility’ 
• Colm McAuliffe ‘It Works in Practice…But Will It Work in Theory?’ 

Panel 3C: Categorisation/Adaptation/Remediation 

Chair: TBC

• Mark Fryers ‘Get the folk out?! The Problems of ‘Folk’ Horror’ 
• Thomas Gebhart ‘Putting the X in Comix: social media platforms, creation, and remediation in Quarantine Comix and Nap Comix’ 
• Karolina Kosińska ‘Adapting/Rendering Britain – The Silent Twins by Agnieszka Smoczyńska’ 

 

Special Edition Workshop Gaming 

2pm-4pm 

 

Afternoon break: 15.45pm – 16.15pm, Daphne Du Maurier Building 

 

Session 4: 16.15 – 17.30pm 

Panel 4A: Sound & Listening Cultures  

Chair: TBC

• Matt Ashdown ‘Access, Agency, and Systems Thinking: Modular Synthesis and Space’ 
• Jean Baptiste Masson ‘“Using a tape recorder is an initiation to a way of life”: Sound hunters, tape-recording clubs, and the pursuit of sound in Britain’ 
• Shortwave Collective - ‘Radio-Dreaming into the Electromagnetic Commons.’ 

Panel 4B: Locating the Celtic 

Chair: TBC

• Marcus Free ‘‘There are men from Ireland, and then there are Irish men’: Accented Masculinities, Irish/British Popular Culture and the Film Saipan (2025)’ 
• Daryl Perrins ‘‘Can you imagine Lou Reed walking ‘round Banwen’? Searching for ‘Cool Cymru’ in 90’s Welsh Cinema’ 
• Malu De Oliveira Barroso TBC 

Panel 4C:  

Chair: TBC

‘Feels So Real' - Embodiment in Culture 

Chair: TBC

• Mark Leary ‘The Pull of the Tide: The Sensorial Experiences, Rituals and Everyday Fabric of a Surfer’s Life.’ 
• Ellie Neason ‘Squatting in the 00: Embodied Liminality; Crusty Culture and the Technologically Mediated Body.’ 
• Matthew Rogers ‘The 'Fuck It!' Principle: psychoactive drug use in contemporary British Film.’ 

 

Thursday evening: Vinyl night, 18.00pm onwards, Verdant Tap Room 

30, Parkengue Kernick Industrial Estate, Penryn TR10 9EP 

• Thursday 10th July 2026
• 9am – 9.30am, Daphne Du Maurier Building 
• Arrival/Registration 

Session 5: 10am – 11.15am, Daphne Du Maurier (DM) Building 

Panel 5A: The Politics of Dance Cultures 

Chair: TBC 

• Sue Smith ‘Happy Hour at The Pig and Whistle’ 
• Edward Stammers ‘New Generation 'Soulies' – Negotiating Identity and Tradition in Northern Soul Subculture’ 
• Karen Wood/Kathryn Stamp ‘Televised dance as a site for social justice work: representation, inclusion and Strictly Come Dancing’ 

Panel 5B: Envisaged Nationhood 

Chair: TBC

• Lisa Socrates ‘The state of England: Competing cinematic narratives of national time, culture and identity in Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987) and Shane Meadow’s This is England (2006)’ 
• Derek Johnston ‘Folk Horror in the Home: Theorising Television and Folk Horror’ 
• Che Wilbraham ‘Grim and Perilous Adventure: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as a Dark Contrast to Dungeons & Dragons’ 

Panel 5C: Finding Cornishness 

Chair: TBC

• Vicky Aimes ‘Between Spectacle and Silence: Tracing Lives Through Objects’ 
• Roel Meulman ‘“This isn’t London Sir”, or is it? - Cornwall as a locus of otherness in John Gilling’s Cornish Hammer Horror Duology’ 
• Jeannie Sinclair ‘Magic, Myth and Medievalism: the Cornish Meadery as working-class heritage’ 

Panel 5D: Imagining the Past 

Chair: TBC

• Cat Mahoney ‘Pop-History: Projecting the politics and aesthetics of the present onto reimagined pasts in Bridgerton and My Lady Jane’ 
• Susan Imgram/Markus Reisenleitner ‘Bletchley’s Colossal Enigma of Imitation’ 
• Francis Mickus ‘Escape and Escapism in The Cadfael Chronicles’ 

 

Session 6: 11.15 – 12.30pm 

Panel 6A: In Search of Buried Treasure; Time Travelling with Jazzie B, Navigating Archival Form and Working Together 

Chair: TBC 

• Panel Presentation: Sophie Everest/Roddy Hawkins/Richard King  

Panel 6B: Contemporary Jewish Women and Media Cultures 

Chair: TBC 

• Sarah Godfrey ‘The Paradox of Hyper (in)visibility: Representation, Jewishness and Gender in Contemporary British Media Culture’ 
• Lies Lanckman ‘“I’m that weird one with the fringe.”: Unpacking the public persona of Claudia Winkleman’ 
• Lorna Richardson ‘A Comparative Digital Ethnography of Jewish Women's TikTok in the UK and USA’ 

Panel 6C: Nation and National Identity 

Chair: TBC 

• Tamsin Johnson ‘Cycling Race Mother: Women’s Cycling, Femininity and the Nation (1928-1939) 
• Frank Mannion ‘"The Dreaming Spires and Beyond: British Identity and Elitism on Film"’ 
• Martin Raybould ‘Unearthing Clean and Filthy Nature in British Wyrd Cinema’  

 

Lunch: 12.30 – 13.15 pm, Daphne Du Maurier (DM Building) 

 

SoFT Cinema, Keynote 2 

Keynote 2:  13.15 – 14.15 

• Professor Abigail Gardner: ‘Incantations of Place in Voice and Song’ 

 

Afternoon break: 14.15pm – 14.45pm, Daphne Du Maurier Building 

 

Session 7: 14.45pm – 16.00pm 

Panel 7A: Time & Memory  

Chair: TBC

• Ahmet Atay ‘Queer Popular Culture: Heartstopper as a Multigenerational Text’ 
• Emma Longmuir ‘‘I like to be a time traveller’:  Echoes, Portals and Shared Memory in Annie Lennox’s 2025 Work’ 
• Ben McPherson ‘Voicing time and place: a cappella as oblique vocality in musical theatre’ 

Panel 7B: Fan Cultures 

• Phoebe Herring/ Ché Wilbraham ‘Fanart, roleplaying games, Warhammer 40,000, co-creation, digital art’ 
• Rachel Miller ‘British fangirl culture, New Kids on the Block, Boy band fandom, Feminist fan studies, Autoethnography’  
• Lillian Venskus ‘Podcasting Horror: Multi-Platform Fandom and Digital Community in Contemporary British Popular Culture’ 

Panel 7C: Camp, subversive and other worldly? Cultural Discourses of the Body 

Chair: TBC

• Rosie Gailor ‘Oompa-Loompas as Cultural Markers’ 
• Gilad Padvor ‘"A Sweet, Technological Baby with a Magic Bag"?  Uncovering Tinky Winky's Subversive Effeminacy, Countercultural Naivety, and Chaotic Campiness’ 
• Janelle Vermaak-Griessel ‘Alien Intimacies: The Uncanny and the Abject Body in Under the Skin (2013)’ 

 

Session 8: 16.00 – 17.15pm 

Panel 8A: Watching the Detectives with the Crime Genre  

Chair: TBC

• Catherine Avery ‘Narrative violation or fantasy? Revising the status of the victim in the crime genre’ 
• Josephine Baetz ‘Solving the contaminated future: Pre- and post-apocalypse in Hard Sun and La Zona’ 
• Shauna Wilton ‘Contradictory Representations of the Family in British Crime Dramas’  

Panel 8B: Take a Look At Me Now – Issues of Representation 

Chair: TBC

• Bronwen Wilson ‘An Everyday Story of Speciesism in Ambridge: Representations and Fan Response to Nonhuman Animal Narratives on The Archers’ 
• Dave McCraig ‘Corinthian Queens and Cashmere Cavemen:    The evolution of the British new form fashion film and Guy Ritchie’s ‘Shop Window’ trilogy’ 

Panel 8C: Legacies, Heritage, Memory 

Chair: TBC

• Minghan Ding ‘Producing Haunted Space: War Memory and Postcolonial Spatial Resistance in 1942 ‘ 
• Jeannine Baetz ‘Haunting the Anthropocene: Representing the Ecological Uncanny in Contemporary Crime Dramas’ 
• Natalie Le Cleu ‘Licence to Flirt: Bond, Moneypenny, and Unconsummated Desire’ 

The British Popular Culture(s) Conference is back at the Cornish Bank for a second year, with a day of workshops, conversations, performances and public lectures that circle around, engage with, celebrate and investigate British Popular Culture(s) and some of its many guises and often sound oriented frequencies.  

All day-time events are free, tickets are required and available here. The radio workshop is limited to 20 places and you can reserve a space as part of the registration process, or by emailing, BritishPopularCulture@falmouth.ac.uk 

We look forward to welcoming you to these special events, with amazing guest speakers, performers and facilitators, and that you will stay for Lucky Rod’s Pizza and the evening’s incredible, ticketed, gig, to send off the second annual conference in style. 

Daytime Events 

10.00 – 12.00: Radio Building Workshop (20 places, sign-up required) 

12.15 – 13.15: Graham Coxon & Rose Ellinor Dougal (The WAEVE), in conversation with Dr Johny Lamb 

13.15 – 14.15: Lunch 

14.15 – 14.45: Sitar performance by Dr Samidha Vedabala 

15.00 – 16.00: Public Keynote Lecture – Professor Oli Mould 

16.15 – 17.15: Mark Jenkin & Gwenno, in conversation with Professor Neil Fox 

17.15 – 17.30: Conference Wrap-up 

Evening Event – Conference delegates have exclusive pre-sale access until 28th May when tickets go on general sale. To access the pre-sale you will require a code which will be emailed to you from the conference team as part of the registration process. Tickets are £27.50. Once tickets go on general sale, these are likely to sell out quickly. 

Pre-sale tickets

20.00 Onwards: Headline Performance by The WAEVE with support from Thirty Pounds of Bone and Hour Minits.  

The WAEVE [stripped back duo set] 
To close out the second annual British Popular Culture(s) [BPC] Conference, the Cornish Bank and the BPC Network are excited and honoured to present an exclusive stripped back set by The WAEVE. The WAEVE is a coming together of two musicians, Graham Coxon (Blur) and Rose Elinor Dougall (The Pipettes), who have formed a new, singular, sonic identity, a powerful elixir of cinematic British folk-rock, post-punk, organic songwriting and freefall jamming. 

Thirty Pounds of Bone 
Under the name Thirty Pounds of Bone, Johny Lamb has made six albums and two EPs to consistent critical praise. He has toured extensively throughout Europe as both solo artist and session musician.  
 
‘Folk with a cosmic sheen, and a human heart.’ (Folk Radio UK) 

‘You become and innocent, sent into the dark waves as you listen.’ (Guardian) 

’Strange in places, but darkly beautiful.’ (Lauren Laverne 6 Music) 

‘Exquisite index of gin-soaked desolation.’ (Mojo) 

‘Exceptional’ (Q Magazine) 

‘Organic and Immediate. Music you can touch with your fingertips.’ (Irish Times) 

Hour Minits 
Falmouth-based duo Taylor Hopewell and Billy Mattock come together in a raw anti-folk indie-rock collision. Stripped back and emotionally dense, intimate and unsteady. 

Glasney Lodge, the student accommodation on the Penryn campus has both double rooms and twin rooms available. Both options are the same price at £49 per room (not per person) per night with an extra £7.50 per person, per night as a B&B option.  

The town of Penryn is a short walk from campus and is serviced by frequent buses from Falmouth and campus. There is a selection of both pubs and restaurants.  

Hotels, guest houses and AirBnBs 

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 - and Merchants Manor. 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, telling 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 attendance with the hotel.    

Details of hotels offering partner rates can be found below:  

The Greenbank Hotel, Starting price of a Single Rate is, £120 - £170.  The Greenbank Hotel, Harbourside, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 2SR, reception@greenbank-hotel.co.uk +44 (0) 1326 312440. Rate includes breakfast, Wifi, parking and VAT.   

The Falmouth Hotel, Starting price of a Single Rate, £159 per night, Castle Beach, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 4NZ. reservations@falmouthhotel.co.uk +44 (0) 1326 312671. Rate includes breakfast, WiFi, VAT. Parking is on a 1st come first served basis.  

Merchants Manor, Rates start at £165 per night. Western Terrace, Falmouth Cornwall TR11 4QJ info@merchantsmanor.com  

St Michael’s Resort, Prices start at £229 per night, Gyllyngvase Beach, Falmouth, Cornwal, TR11 4NB. info@stmichaelsresort.com  01326312707

By Train: There are regular services to Truro from all major British cities. London Paddington in 4 hours, from Exeter, 2.5 hours, Bristol 3hrs. Change at Truro for regular branch line to Penryn, which can be reached in only 15 minutes and Falmouth in 20 minutes. The Penryn campus is just a short walk from Penryn station and there are also regular buses.  

By Bus: Penryn campus (often written as Tremough or Tremough Campus on timetables) is serviced by dedicated university buses (U1, U2) from Truro, Redruth and Falmouth running frequently throughout the day. There are also local services (60, 64, 65, 69A) operating between Falmouth town, surrounding residential areas and Penryn campus. The journey from Falmouth is approximately 15 - 25 minutes. Check out our travel page for further information.  

Long distance National Express coaches stop in Penryn and Falmouth.  

By plane: Newquay airport is 40km away. There are direct flights from London (Gatwick, Stanstead), 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 Bristol airport approximately 264km from Falmouth. Both are well connected by bus and express services to the nearest train station.  

By Road: Abacus and Falmouth Taxis (01326 212141) offer short journeys and airport transfers.  

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.  

By Bike: Penryn campus has secure bike storage facilities along with Beryl e-bike hire stations.  

Rather than holding a conference dinner, we have decided to place popular culture at the heart of conference proceedings. 

Vinyl Night with Heavy Friends, Thursday 9 July 2026, 5pm onwards 

On the Thursday evening we again will host 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. But this year, the choice will be harder! This year's theme acknowledges the current nostalgia trend for 2016 online and 50th anniversary of punk. This year it's all about British music released in 1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016 and 2026. Yes, it may be restrictive, but it will be fun! The organising committee will supply a selection of vinyl for you to choose from on the night, or delegates can bring their own selection! Find out more about Heavy Friends here.   

If you wish to try your hand on the decks and play with 3 tunes of your choice, make sure you choose the option on the Registration form.   

Saturday 11 July 2026 programme  

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 to close the conference on Saturday evening – music!  

The day programme includes (so far) a DIY radio building workshop with an international feminist artist group, Shortwave Collective – no soldering and no experience necessary! Cornish film director, Mark Jenkin, will be in conversation with Cornish/Welsh singer songwriter, Gwenno. Professor Oli Mould delivers his public keynote, ‘Psychedelic Creativity’.  

Saturday 11 July 2026, 8pm onwards (ticketed) 

The Waeve (duo set), Thirty Pounds of Bone (Solo), Hour Minits (duo).   

Cost of the ticket is not covered by the registration fee this year. But you will be able to secure a ticket prior to the general sale. More information soon on price and purchasing options.  

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 The Touc Inn which is free to all. Other bars/clubs/eateries are available.

There is interest from Intellect Publishing regarding publishing a Handbook on British Popular Cultures with a view to including articles developed from conference papers. We encourage you to consider this opportunity and if you’re interested in publishing your work in the handbook, we look forward to discussing this more with you at the conference.   

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.  

Incantations of Place in Voice and Song

Physical place, mythic place, temporal place, geological place, pastoral place, rural place, colonial place, post-colonial place. Jurassic place. How do places sound? Linked by limestone and my own lived places, this talk uses material from over a decade to consider how voice and song evoke place. The place is England in the twenty-first century and specifically, two limestone counties in the west and southwest, Gloucestershire and Dorset, it uses six examples, three voices from digital storytelling projects with migrants and veterans, and three songs from the Dorset musician PJHarvey. Pulling a thread through the voices and Harvey’s albums Is This Desire (1998), Let England Shake (2011) and I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023), the talk spotlights the bass notes of place, its presence and elusiveness, to argue that they foreground the instability of regional, national, and imperial place.

Harvey's radical pastoral work sits outside narratives of Englishness that have surfaced in British popular music culture, bringing us into a reckoning with the loss, yearning and violence associated with Englishness and placed identity. Equally, the migrant and veteran voices reveal memories of place that bring to the fore complex tapestries of empire and migration. Listening to songs of the chalk hills or Holloways of Dorset, stories of the deserts of 1960s’ Yemen, and the train stations of 1930s Vienna affords a sounding out of narratives and memories of place that reframe archives of Englishness.

The talk draws on theories of music, sound and place to illustrate how (accented) voice and (popular) song operate as incantations of place and belonging that are amalgams of places solid, places left, places furrowed and places bereft. Between fitting in and longing for, belonging sounds out as something we might both strive for and mourn. It is always before and behind us; we are forever on its edge(s), somewhere between flux and firm ground, and we can hear those oscillations and paeans in the six songs and stories from the limestone ridges of England.

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. 

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.