Dolly Birds and Swinging Cities

Date: Thursday 19th May 2016

Time: 10.00am – 3.00pm

Location: No 70 Oxford St, Manchester M1 5NH

Tickets: £10/Free for concessions (Catering included) - booking essential via https://dolly-birds-and-swinging-cities.eventbrite.com 

This one day symposium brings together experts of media and popular culture to discuss the impact of alleged new found freedoms for women in the 1960s. Increased affluence, cosmopolitanism, advancements in technology, the loosening of traditional gender roles and explosions in terms of popular culture all arguably contributed to the opening up of new spaces and opportunities for women. Under them theme of ‘world’ this symposium confronts the issue of global cultural flows and new worlds opening up for women in the sixties. Presentations focus on a diverse range of perspectives including, new female cultural icons in film, music and fashion, girls comics, clubbing and dancing, widowhood in the 1960s and girls and cinema. The focus is on examples of women and the sixties from Europe and the USA. After the symposium pop culture expert and Blue Badge Guide, Jean Bailo, will lead a pop culture tour of sixties Manchester.

This symposium is organised by MMU pop culture scholars Dr Katie Milestone (Department of Sociology) and Dr Joan Ormrod (Manchester School of Art) and is funded by the Humanities in Public series. Katie is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and has researched and published on pop music, gender and popular culture. Publications include Gender and Popular Culture (Polity) and the forthcoming Discotheque: Revolutions of Dance Music (Reaktion). Joan is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media and an expert on comics and surfing culture has published on Wonder Woman, time travel and surfing countercultures in the 1960s and ‘70s. She is editor of Routledge’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Contributors;

• Pamela Church Gibson; London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
• Dr Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion. She set up the only MA programme in Fashion and Film and is Principal Editor of Film, Fashion & Consumption. Research expertise includes film and fashion, history and heritage, gender and spectacle, cities and consumption. Publications include Fashion & Celebrity Culture (Berg 2011) and Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (Routledge 2013).

• Mel Gibson; University of Northumbria 
• Dr Mel Gibson is a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University who researches comics, graphic novels, children’s literature and memory. She is also a consultant working with schools, libraries and other institutions on issues around visual literacies.

• Georgina Gregory; University of Central Lancashire
• Dr Georgina Gregory is a senior lecturer in Film and Media Studies at University of Central Lancashire where she teaches modules on youth and popular culture and the visual representation of popular music. She also works as a freelance music researcher. Her research interests include dance and gender, tribute entertainment, and popular music and spirituality.

• Ewa Mazierska; University of Central Lancashire
• Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies, at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire. She published over twenty monographs and edited collections on European cinema, representation of work in film, gender and popular music. They include From Self-Fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest: Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present (Berghahn, 2015), Work in Cinema: Labor and Human Condition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and with Elżbieta Ostrowska and Women in Polish Cinema (Berghahn, 2006).

• Gary Needham; Nottingham Trent University
• Dr Gary Needham is senior lecturer in Film and Television Studies, Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Brokeback Mountain (2010) and co-editor of Warhol in Ten Takes (2013), Queer TV (2009), and Asian Cinemas (2006). He is an associate editor of the journal Film, Fashion, and Consumption and series co-editor with Yannis Tzioumakis of Hollywood Centenary. He is currently working on Factory Girl/Factory Films: Edie Sedgwick and the Films of Andy Warhol for Bloomsbury.

Followed by:

Women and pop culture in sixties Manchester

Guided walk led by Jean Bailo

3.30pm – 5.30pm

£3.00

More details and tickets to follow

This event is part of Humanities in Public's World strand.

Manchester Metropolitan University is committed to disability equality. If you have any access requirements, please let us know via 0161 247 6710 or email us at h.darby@mmu.ac.uk before you arrive to help us to make sure that your visit to the event is as enjoyable as possible