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.
Abigail Gardner is Professor of Cultural Studies and has published prolifically in her key research interests of music, gender and ageing. Monographs include, Listening, Belonging and Memory (Bloomsbury, 2023), Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2019, Routledge), and PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (AshgPJate, 2015). Abigail has led three European funded projects on digital storytelling, media literacy and migration and is Associate Editor of the Journal of The International Association of the Study of Popular Music.
Oli Mould is Professor in Human Geography and whose research focuses on urban creativity, activism and politics, cutting across a number of scholarly concerns and disciplines such as, cultural studies and social theory. Oli has published work on the creative practices of cities, architecture, the representation of cities in film and labour in the creative economy. Monographs include, Urban Subversion and the Creative City (2015), Against Creativity (2018), Seven Ethics Against Capitalism: Towards a Planetary Commons (2021) and Postcapitalist Cities: Towards a Common Urban Future due to be published in 2026.