29th May 2009 12:00pm - 30th May 2009 6:00pm
Westlain House, Falmer Campus
The first international Big Reveal conference examined the phenomenon of ‘Lifestyle television’ and took place at the University of Salford, UK, two years ago, resulting in the book Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal (Ashgate, 2008). At that first conference it could be claimed that despite the rapid expansion of the genre in television scheduling over the last twenty years, the area was still relatively under-explored by scholars. In the two years since, there had been more research on the phenomenon of ‘lifestyle programming’, and the form itself has become a dominant mode in the prime time schedule.
The lifestyle television format has been used for programmes covering subjects as diverse as cooking, gardening, home and body makeovers, parenting, nutritional education, and instructions on cleaning your house. ‘Lifestyle’ has now come to include the kind of programming that would once have been presented in documentary form. Furthermore, the impact of digitization and a proliferation of new channels has seen lifestyle formats streamed across a multitude of platforms, inviting audience engagement on a number of levels.
This conference aimed to address the implications of this form of television and these new contexts and asked how media and communications scholars should address the genre.
What are the effects of the format on television schedules and on traditional forms of programming? How do audiences read and incorporate Lifestyle TV into their everyday lives? Do forms of television that centre on the encounter between a television ‘expert’ and ‘ordinary’ people require new forms of regulation? Does this form raise particular ethical questions? How have these formats been franchised and how are they delivered in different national/global contexts? To what extent is the global economic crisis reflected in the discourses of recent lifestyle programming?
The aim of the conference was to bring international academics from across the disciplines together to discuss the questions that the ‘Big Reveal II’ set up. Scholars working in television studies, critical theory, cultural and gender studies, media and communication studies, anthropology and the social sciences are invited to submit abstracts.
The conference was organised by: Prof Deborah Phillips, Dr Julie Doyle and Irmi Karl.
See further details at: www.it.brighton.ac.uk/BigReveal2/programme.php.
