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Staff Profile

Dr Gareth Longstaff

Faculty Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6068
  • Address: Room 2.83
    Media, Arts and Cultures,
    School of Arts and Cultures
    Armstrong Building
    Queen Victoria Road
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

Background

I am a lecturer in media and cultural theory and the head of learning and teaching for both the UG and PGT programmes in Media, Culture, Heritage. My teaching and research interests are primarily concerned with sexuality, celebrity, pornography discourses of representation / self representation, identity/identifications, nostalgia, psychoanalysis and visual culture. I work at the intersection of how these are connected to other dimensions of cultural, philosophical, mediated and social life and in my research I closely engage with queer theoretical critique and Lacanian psychoanalysis to do so. At its core both my teaching and research seeks to examine the construction and representation of subjectivity, identity and desire via the mediation of the subject in film, photography, pornography/sexual representation, and networked / digital media.  I also work towards how these paradigms are connected to other dimensions of visual, cultural and social experience.

Google Scholar

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Module Leader - Celebrity Culture
  • Module Leader - Research Dissertations 
  • Dissertation Supervision

Postgraduate Teaching

  • Methodologies: Researching Media, Culture & Society
  • Dissertation Supervision
Research

My current research can be split into three inter-related strands.  

Psychoanalysis and Queer Theory - In the first, I am extending my research around the critical use of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in relation to contemporary representations of gender, masculinity, sexuality, and desire in pornographic and digital / networked media.  I am also interested in emerging transformations, and circulations, of the categories of ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ which are reconfiguring how we think about representation and self-representation. In particular, my most recently published work and work in preparation attempts to critically connect these practices with online and offline modes of desire and signification. 

Celebrity, Pornography and Self-Representation -  In the second, I am honing in this interest in desire to specifically examine how identity and identification through mediated strategies of representation activate a precarious politics of psycho-socio-sexual desire.   In this strand, I have been concentrating on the paradigms of neoliberalism, self-representation, celebrity, reality TV, and authenticity in order to think about how, where, and why desire occurs in contemporary media.  I am also in the process of producing my first monograph 'Celebrity and Pornography: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Self-Representation' due for publication in 2020.  

Queer Media, Culture and Heritage - In the third and I have also created and lead on the Queer Media, Culture and Heritage (QMCH) seminar series and project that connects to the broad themes around ‘Who we are’ (and ‘who we are not’) as queer subjects in the North-East region and beyond. The projects content and output is directly allied to queer / LGBT identities and identifications, representation and the ways in which cultural change is closely connected to the impact of mediated changes in community, resistance and performance in the region. It also correlates and is shaped by issues connected to heritage, creative arts practice, social renewal, oral histories and archives/special collections. All of these inter-disciplinary themes and approaches will be addressed and explored through a regular programme of talks and screenings.

Publications