Representation Theorists

Katie Spencer

Buckingham• Simon Buckingham created and published in 1996 the unorganisation

philosophy. Subsequently, Simon became a serial entrepreneur, founding his first start up in 1999. Mobile Lifestreams as it was initially called started out as a research and consulting company with Simon authoring the "Yes 2 SMS" report that accurately predicted the success of the SMS text messaging service. Renamed Mobile Streams, Simon registered and launched the domain name and service ringtones.com. Mobile Streams completed its Initial Public Offering in February 2006 (LSE:MOS). At the same time, Liberty Media, the U.S. content company became a strategic investor in the company.

• In January 2006, Simon Buckingham also become the CEO of Zoombak, a provider of GPS devices and services for family safety and enterprise applications. Zoombak is owned by Liberty Media but managed by Simon and Mobile Streams. More than 100,000 Zoombak devices had been shipped by October 2009.

• In 2010, Simon founded his third start up in New York Appitalism, Inc. (http://www.appitalism.com). Launched in September 2010 in 51 countries, Appitalism is an open app store for the democratic discovery of digital and mobile apps and content including music, apps, games, eBooks and videos.

• Born in Oxford, England, Simon has been based in New York since 2005.

Gauntlett• Gauntlett graduated from the University of York in Sociology in 1992. He then took his PhD and then taught at the University of Leeds from

1993 to 2002, then was appointed Professor of Media and Audiences at Bournemouth University. In 2006 he joined the School of Media, Arts and Design at University of Westminster as Professor of Media and Communications.

• Gauntlett's critique of media 'effects' studies sparked controversy in 1995, and since then he has published a number of books and research on the role of popular media in people's lives. In particular he has focused on the way in which digital media is changing the experience of media in general.

• Since the late 1990s he has produced the website Theory.org.uk.• In Reading Media Theory, Barlow & Mills state: "David Gauntlett is a prominent, public academic, who has spent his career engaging in

research activities which have deliberately involved the public, and have crossed the traditional divide between the academic community and the outside world."

• In 2007, he was shortlisted for the 'Young Academic Author of the Year' award in the Times Higher awards. (Ultimately the award was won by historian Richard Toye).

• This approach asks participants to make something as part of the research process. Gauntlett's work of this kind began with Video Critical (1997), in which children were asked to make videos about the environment, and then in a number of projects which are discussed in Creative Explorations (2007). As well as studies in which participants have been invited to make video, diaries, collage, and drawings, Gauntlett has explored the use of Lego Serious Play as a tool in sociology and social research. This approach makes use of metaphor and invites participants to build metaphorical models of their identities. The process of making something, and then reflecting upon it, is claimed to give a more nuanced insight into participants' feelings or experiences.

• This work has been supported by awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.• In 2007, Gauntlett published online the article Media Studies 2.0, which created some discussion amongst media studies educators. The

article argues that the traditional form of media studies teaching and research fails to recognise the changing media landscape in which the categories of 'audiences' and 'producers' blur together, and in which new research methods and approaches are needed. Andy Ruddock has written that Gauntlett's "ironic polemic" includes "much to value", and acknowledges that the argument "is more strategy than creed", but argues that audiences still exist, and experience mass media specifically as audience, and so it would be premature to dispose of the notion of 'audience' altogether.

• The inaugural issue of the journal Interactions was dedicated to a discussion of 'Media Studies 2.0', with contributions from a number of experts and a response by Gauntlett.

• In 2008 Gauntlett proposed 'the Make and Connect Agenda', an attempt to rethink audience studies in the context of media users as producers as well as consumers of media material. This argues that there is a shift from a 'sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a 'making-and-doing culture', and that harnessing creativity in both Web 2.0 and in other everyday creative activities will play a role in tackling environmental problems. These ideas are developed further in 'Making is Connecting‘.

Mulvey• Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British

film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

• Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').

• Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate the "patriarchal" Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. She wrote, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article."

• "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists that continued into the mid 1980s. Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender. For example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film – a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay, lesbian and bisexual spectatorships might also be different. Her article also did not take into account the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars. Gay male film theorists such as Richard Dyer have used Mulvey's work as a starting point to explore the complex projections that many gay men fix onto certain female stars (e.g. Liza Minnelli, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland).

• Feminist critic Gaylyn Studlar wrote extensively to contradict Mulvey's central thesis that the spectator is male and derives visual pleasure from a dominant, sadistic perspective. Studlar suggested rather that visual pleasure for all audiences is derived from a passive, masochistic perspective, where the audience seeks to be powerless and overwhelmed by the cinematic image.

• Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that took all objections into account. She addressed many of her critics, and changed some of her opinions, in a follow-up article, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'" (which also appears in the Visual and Other Pleasures collection).

• Mulvey's most recent book is titled Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).

Butler• Judith Butler (born 24 February 1956) is an American post-structuralist

philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is the

• Maxine Elliott professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France.

• In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

• Her research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.

• Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.

Winship• Christopher Winship (born Topeka, Kansas) is Diker-Tishman Professor of sociology at Harvard

University, and principal of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard. He is best known for his contributions to quantitative methods in sociology and, since 1995, has served as editor of Sociological Methods and Research. He received the 2006 Paul Lazarsfeld Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association, which recognizes outstanding contributions over a career to sociological methodology.

• He grew up in New Britain, Connecticut and earned his bachelor degree in mathematics and sociology from Dartmouth College in 1977. He holds a Ph.D in sociology from Harvard.

• After leaving Harvard he did a one year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a two-year fellowship at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

• In 1980 he joined the Sociology Department at Northwestern University. During his twelve years at Northwestern he was Director of the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and for four years chair of the Department of Sociology. He was a founding member of Northwestern's Department of Statistics, and held a courtesy appointment in Economics.

• From 1984 to 1986, he was the director of the Economics Research Center at NORC.• He returned to Harvard in 1992, and served as the Chair of Harvard's sociology department from

1998 to 2001.• He is currently doing research on several topics: The Ten Point Coalition, a group of black ministers

who are working with the Boston police to reduce youth violence; statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; causes of the racial difference in performance in elite colleges and universities; changes in the racial differential in imprisonment rates over the past sixty years.

McRobbie• McRobbie’s best-known work revolves around the analysis of gender in youth culture. She was critical of

the work on subcultures at the CCCS completed by Paul Willis and Dick Hebdige, because of its lack of attention to gender. Furthermore, she stressed the need to analyse the nature of young women’s cultural life, in order to establish whether it was structured differently from that of boys. This approach led to papers on the culture of femininity, romance, pop music and teenybop culture, the teenage magazine Jackie and so on. These earlier essays can be found in Feminism and Youth Culture (1991).[1]

• McRobbie refined her approach and the entailed research through the 1980s. She discussed the importance of dance in female youth cultures and analysed the developing informal economy of second-hand markets in her own edited collection Zoot Suits and Second-hand Dress (1989). Cultural shifts in gender caused her to reconsider some of her earlier arguments. She has studied rave culture and the opportunity that it provides for new roles for young women as well as discussing the shift to the centrality of pop in magazines for young girls such as Just Seventeen. These concerns were connected to the influence and evaluation of debates about postmodernism in theory and culture which are to be found in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994).

• McRobbie’s essays have had a large impact on the consideration of youth culture. She has been at the forefront of arguments emphasising the importance of taking gender into account and for the need to examine the works of male writers for the versions of masculinity they contain. In the 1990s, McRobbie was seen as one of the most thoughtful and sophisticated commentator on magazines for young women. She has carefully studied the ways in which the magazines have changed since the 1970s, and has repeatedly asked difficult questions about what kind of magazine feminists would want, if they are unhappy with today's magazines.

• Her current research focuses on the ‘new culture industry’, particularly on the labour practices in the world of freelance, casualised creative work and micro-enterprises of creative labour such as fashion design, art-working, multi-media, curating and arts administration

Bibligraphy

• Information taken from wikipedia.org.uk