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Stephanie King

stephanie.king.13@ucl.ac.uk

I completed a BA in Art History at Plymouth University in 2013. Following my undergraduate studies I joined the History of Art Department at UCL and obtained my MA in 2014. I am now a second year PhD candidate in the Department working under the supervision of Dr Stephanie Schwartz

Thesis

(Re)Mediating Under-Employment: Towards an Instrumental Practice in Neo-Liberal Britain (1974-1997)

Centred on the conjunction of visual representation and politics, my doctoral research examines how oppositional image makers have mobilised the camera as a prism through which to scrutinise Thatcherism, as well as the mass media institutions through which that ideology has been creatively constructed and reproduced. This research is performed through a close engagement with work of Stuart Hall and the literature that emerged from Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham during the seventies and eighties. My current research questions how knowledge is produced and mediated through the hegemonic medium of the television screen. By thinking about the liminality of broadcasting - transient, both within (the home) and without, present and distant, immediate and mediated - I intend to scrutinise the various ways in which broadcasting is implicated in the reaffirmation of existing power structures and social systems, as well as the articulation of new ones. In particular, I am interested in thinking about how the nation - specifically, a notion of "Britishness" - is 'invented' and reinvented through the various channels of the media. While at the same time, I am considering how broadcasting places pressure on our conceptualisation of home as a discretely bounded space.

Research Interests

Counter-hegemonic photography and film, the politics of representation, class politics, mass media representations of class and race, geo-politics, nation/nationalism, postcolonial theory, Stuart Hall and cultural studies, the discursive and representational construction of Thatcherism.

Funding

I have a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarships in the Humanities which was awarded by The Wolfson Foundation.

Publications

'A1: Britain on the Verge', Art Bermondsey Project Sopace, London, 16 January 2018- 20 January 2018, Object Vol 20 (2019)

'Mediating the Nation After '68: Thinking Through Difference in Exit Photography Group's Survival Programmes in Britain's Inner Cities' (publication pending, 2020)

Talks

The Afterlives of '68: Documentary on the Left, the Left Conference, Lisbon, 9-10 November 2018

‘Dissenting Documentary: Towards an Instrumental Practice in Neo-liberal Britain,’ Thirteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, Vancouver, Canada, 27-29 June 2018

'The Less acceptable Face of Capitalism': Mediating Difference at the (Post-)Industrial Periphery, Cultural Resilience, Resilient Cultures: the art of resistance in changing worlds/ CMCI PhD Conference, Kings College London, 13 June 2017

'Introductory Thoughts' Stephanie King and Katarzyna Falęcka, 'Decolonising History: Visualisations of Conflict in a 'Post-War' Europe, 18 March 2017

'Selective Traditions: Colourlessness in the 1970s', UCL History of Art Research Seminar, 30th June 2016

Events

Conference coordinator: 'Decolonising History: Visualisations of Conflict in a "Post-War" Europe', 18 March 2017

Awards

My MA thesis 'Against Hegemony: (Re)Framing the 'un- and under-employed' in Exit Photography Group's Survival Programmes in Britain's Inner Cities' was awarded the Oxford Art Journal Dissertation Prize in 2014.

My BA thesis on avant-garde masculinities and the Russian Revolution was awarded the Ben Hartley Dissertation Prize in 2013.

Teaching

2015/16: PTGA Undergraduate Foundation Course

Other roles

Current: ReSkIN Assistant Coordinator