Current project: Gender, Sexuality & Race in Contemporary Screen Cultures
This project is led by Clara Bradbury-Rance, Liberal Arts Early Career Development Fellow
The common thread of Clara Bradbury-Rance’s research, which has inhabited a range of disciplinary contexts from Film Studies to Digital Humanities, is the study of contemporary culture through queer and feminist theories of gender and sexuality. Her first book, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, is published by Edinburgh University Press in March 2019. The book considers the simultaneous increase in lesbian visibility in twenty- first century cinema and the shift away from the emphasis on identity categories in critical discourses of sexuality (for more information, see her full research profile).
Clara’s new research explores the shared structures and narratives through which feminists in the public sphere write, project and speak the self in the twenty-first century. The project, entitled Feminist Citations: Gender, Sexuality and Race in Contemporary Screen Cultures, addresses: the mainstreaming of feminist programming, the relationship between celebrity culture and activist movements, the cultural influence of social media platforms and mythologies of US dominance in transnational feminisms. She argue that media transformations have generated new models of feminist citation that have reinvigorated commitments to a collective political agenda. Leading up to the eventual publication of a research monograph, outputs for the project will include a symposium on feminism and new media, a workshop on activist and cultural networks, and the use of video essays with co-research participants to explore themes of feminism and popular cultural citation.
Current project: The politics of post-tsunami recovery in South India
This project explores how post-tsunami relief and rehabilitation impacted on development trajectories in South India – particularly how experiences of relief and rehabilitation has shifted local people’s interaction with the state. As a critical development geographer, I’m interested in how the post-tsunami response served to reproduce or challenge pre-existing patterns of unequal resource distribution and access. In a variety of ways, post-tsunami rehabilitation was found to stimulate local people’s confidence and motivation to challenge resource-holders and hold them to account – interpreted as a subtle evolution of state-citizen social contracts. Fieldwork was undertaken in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands (ANI) and Tamil Nadu over 9 months in 2014. In June-July 2018, I’ll return to South India to explore pathways to impact and deepen connections with research collaborators. The trip involves: (1) co-hosting policy and research workshops at TISS University (Mumbai) and Anna University (Chennai); and (2) holding participatory arts workshops in tsunami-affected villages.
This research has benefitted from funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (International Collaboration Fund) and the Cultural Institute (Collaborative Innovation Scheme).
Fantasy/Animation (www.fantasy-animation.org) sexamines the relationship between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Established in May 2018, the website provides a space for discussion and debate among like-minded academics, practitioners, special interest groups and fans of fantasy and/or animation.
The website was co-founded by Dr Christopher Holliday and Dr Alexander Sergeant (Bournemouth University), and emerged out of their co-edited anthology Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) for Routledge’s AFI Film Readers series that examines the historical, cultural and theoretical points of intersection between fantasy and animation. The website has been developed to open out a critical conversation to better frame the study of the rich legacy and complexity of animated fantasy media.
We combine published blog posts (critical editorials; media analyses; film, television and book reviews; conference reports) with original audiovisual research material, such as video essays (also available on the Fantasy/Animation Youtube channel) and podcasts.