Men Should Talk - Professor Gareth Palmer November 8, 2011

The Professorial Inaugural Lecture Series

The next Professorial Inaugural Lecture of this semester will be given by Professor Gareth Palmer, Professor of Media in the School of Media, Music and Performance and is entitled Men Should Talk.

Register here: https://supporters.salford.ac.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=694
About the Lecture

In this lecture I will bring the two parts of my life together to discuss constructions of masculinity and how men are living with them.

Over the past two years I have been working part-time as a therapist. During this time I have seen over 110 men who have discussed a range of challenges concerning the various scenarios in which they are expected to perform to certain standards. My work as an academic has been mostly focused on variants of reality television. However I have recently returned to the issue of masculinity I first visited with papers and publications in the late nineties. My aim now is to bring these two spheres together to consider how men are negotiating the representations of masculinities that circulate in the media. Whilst the phrase ‘masculinity is in crisis’ is now very much in common parlance my aim is to reveal what this crisis feels like in the lives of men and to suggest some possible solutions.
About Professor Palmer

Gareth Palmer is a Professor of Media in the School of Media, Music & Performance at the University of Salford. He is widely published on reality television and surveillance. In 2003 he published ‘Discipline and Liberty’ with Manchester University Press - one of the first books to look at the connections between surveillance and reality television. In 2008 he organised the first International Conference on Lifestyle Television. In 2010 he published a collection of papers on the subject with Ashgate entitled ‘Exposing Lifestyle Television.’ Palmer took on the editorship of the long-running Journal of Media Practice (Intellect) in 2010. Since that time he has also established the allied website ‘JMPScreenworks.com’.

Palmer has always combined his writing with practical work. He has won external funding for media projects, more recently a grant from the Learning Technologies Fund to produce ‘New Mornings, Old Streets’ about the people of Salford. He is co-organiser of the Salford Sampler, a new venture designed to develop the story-telling capabilities of local people.

Palmer qualified as a hypnotherapist in 2000. Since September of 2009 he has been working part-time for Lasting Change, Butterfly Effect and Menshouldtalk.com. His work here focuses almost exclusively on men.

Official Website: http://www.salford.ac.uk/home-page/events/events/men-should-talk-professor-gareth-palmer