Dr Claudia Lueders

This book offers transdisciplinary scholarship which challenges the agendas of and markers around traditional social scientific fields.　

It builds on the belief that the study of major issues in the global cultural and political economies benefit from a perspective that rejects the limitations imposed by established boundaries, whether disciplinary, conceptual, symbolic or material. Established and early career academics explore and embrace contemporary political sociology following the ‘global’ and ‘cultural’ turns of recent decades. Categories such as state, civil society, family, migration, citizenship and identity are interrogated and sometimes found to be ill-suited to the task of analyzing global complexities. The limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and situated and mobile subjects and objects are all referenced in this book.

The book will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, Geography, Area studies and European studies.

This chapter discusses the limitations of the academic community and the challenges of academic scholarship by exploring the potential of ‘academic encounters’ for the understanding of borders within academia in the context of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. It reflects on Chris Rumford’s work on borders and strangeness and applies it to the academic context. The chapter aims to challenge existing borders within the academic world. It looks at the tuition fees and funding policies within the UK and discusses what kind of impact these policies have on students and young academics. Chris Rumford argues that while Robertson’s definition of globalisation seems to suggest that the subjective experience of globalisation further drives interconnectivity, it also creates a sense of strangeness due to the tension between ‘a highly developed global awareness’ and ‘the global dis-connectivity’ as a result of individual experiences of less-than-complete global connectivity.

The thesis discusses the significance of Britpop’s representation of British identity for British youth and their attitude towards British identity in the 1990’s. Taking issue with the dominant academic critique of Britpop as an ‘assertion of white, male, heterosexual Englishness’ (Bennett and Stratton, 2010, p.6; Percival, 2010; Hawkins, 2010; Whiteley, 2010) the thesis argues that Britpop’s representation of national identity was more complex and ambiguous than previously suggested by academia and that Britpop’s positive attitude towards Britain and its nostalgic image of British identity needs to be interpreted as a cultural critique of social, economic and political changes in the United Kingdom in the 90s. The concepts of ‘Imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983) and of ‘Banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995) are used as a starting point to explore the significant role of young people and popular music for the construction and reproduction of national identity.

Drawing on a qualitative textual analysis of Britpop lyrics, album reviews, and mainstream media coverage alongside data collected from qualitative interviews/surveys with musicians, PR agents, journalists, and fans, it also discusses how national identity is constructed and maintained through cultural references in popular music and related media discourses. The results of the empirical research which is focused on research categories such as British lifestyle/suburbia, ethnicity, gender and class show that Britpop’s heavy use of cultural references created a strong sense of nostalgia and played a significant role in Britpop’s mainstream success in the UK as it deliberately connected the contemporary culture of the younger generation with the cultural heritage of older generations which strengthened Britain’s image as a nation of great pop music and was celebrated in the 2012 Olympic games open/closing ceremonies. Finally, the thesis argues that in contrast to the British Invasion bands who were selling British pop music/identity abroad, Britpop bands were selling British pop music/identity back to the British people.