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Professor Angela McRobbie

Staff details

Position Emeritus Professor
Department Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Email a.mcrobbie (@gold.ac.uk)
Professor Angela McRobbie

Teaching

Since contracting C19 in March 2020 and being hospitalised Angela has become, in October 2020, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies. Prior to this, she taught across many modules including the first year BA Culture and Cultural Studies course, as well as the MA in Media and Communications, the MA in Cultural Studies, MA Culture Industries and MA Gender, Media and Culture.

From Autumn 2020 onwards she is offering occasional guest lectures to the above MA courses. She also continues in a background role with 4 PhD students, Eleanor Kilroy (CHASE with TAPS) Philipp Kennel (with Politics) Krys Osei (MCCS) and Jayne Stynes (MCCS). From being appointed at Goldsmiths in 1998 Angela has supervised more than 20 PhD candidates to completion, many of whom now hold posts in universities including Kings College, London, Leeds University, Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt, Technische-Universitat  (TU-Berlin) Berlin, University of Southern Denmark, and other universities across the world.

As Emeritus Angela will also continue to give lectures and talks including University of Marburg (November 2020 Annual Gender Lecture) and University College Dublin (February 2021 Annual Inequalities Lecture). Angela is a Founding Member of the Critical Fashion Studies Seminar which was inaugurated in October 2019 at London College of Fashion UAL. At Goldsmiths she hosted the Innovative Methodologies in Fashion Studies PHD Forum in November 2020. As Associate Member SFB 1265, Institute of Sociology, TU-Berlin Angela will continue to co-host research seminars in Berlin with Prof. Martina Loew.

Recent Awards

  • 2013 AHRC CREAte Goldsmiths, University of London ‘Fashion Micro-Enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan’
  • 2016 Mercator Fellow, University of Oldenburg
  • 2018 Fellow of the British Academy
  • 2019 Honorary PhD (Research), Glasgow University
  • 2020 Associate Member SFB 1265 Technische-University Berlin

Research Interests

Current Research

During 2020 Angela has been completing a monograph from the empirical work for the AHRC CREAte study investigating the working lives of small-scale independent fashion designers in three key cities: London, Berlin and Milan. Co-authored with Dr Dan Strutt (Goldsmiths MCCS) and Dr Carolina Bandinelli ( University of Warwick)  this book will be published by Palgrave Pivot Fashion as Creative Industry: Designer Livelihoods in London Berlin and Milan 2014-2020).

Following from this study Angela has developed two further projects focussing on fashion as urban creative economy, one has crystallised in the Critical Fashion Studies Seminar (with co-founders Dr Jo Entwistle, (Kings College, London), Prof Agnes Rocamora (London College of Fashion) and Dr Jane Tynan (Vrie University of Amsterdam). This Seminar functions as a forum for regular events with the aim of encouraging greater diversity in the field of fashion studies, also to replenish the field with socially engaged younger scholars as well as to foreground issues of labour and working lives across fashion’s global economy.

The second strand from the original CREAte work extends to a study of small-scale fashion designer livelihoods and responses to the pandemic of March 2020 onwards. In collaboration with Prof Oliver MacConnell bbw-Hochschule (University of Applied Sciences) Berlin, this will entail online interviews with independent fashion professionals in the UK, in Germany and also in Italy. Funding proposals are currently being developed with a view to research beginning in June 2021.

Alongside this specialism, in labour and working lives in the creative economy, Angela continues to focus also on feminism, and the popular cultural forms which have accompanied the political culture of neoliberalism. In 2021 she will start work on her third book forming a trilogy of studies in this field. Titled Critical Feminist Pedagogy in Times of #MeToo this book will entail close attention to intergenerational dialogue and dispute in feminist social and cultural theory. Chapters will focus on the new feminist politics of looking and spectatorship, on the methodological gift of Saidiya Hartman’s writing, on the economy of feeling in Berlant and Ngai, and on the teaching machine in the neoliberal university. To be published in 2022.

Angela will also be writing essays for peer review journals, including on ‘The Pandemic Legacy of Ulrich Beck; Risk Society and Beyond’. Similarly on ‘Stuart Hall: The Essays of Remembrance’.

In 2021 Angela will edit and contribute to a volume In Honour of Ulrike Ottinger: Artist, Film-maker, Documentarist (under review Edinburgh University Press).

Publications

Book

McRobbie, Angela. 2020. Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience': Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9781509525065

McRobbie, Angela. 2015. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Polity Press. ISBN 9780745661957

McRobbie, Angela. 2010. Top Girls: Feminismus und der Aufstieg des neoliberalen Geschlechterregimes. Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. ISBN 978-3531162720

McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. London: Sage. ISBN 9780761970613

McRobbie, Angela. 2005. The Uses of Cultural Studies. Sage. ISBN 1412908442

McRobbie, Angela. 2000. Feminism and Youth Culture 2nd Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0333770313

McRobbie, Angela. 1999. In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415137508

McRobbie, Angela. 1998. British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415057813

Edited Book

Paechter, Carrie F.; George, Rosalyn P. and McRobbie, Angela, eds. 2016. Pedagogical Responses to the Changing Position of Girls and Young Women. London: Routledge. ISBN 978_1_138-65492_1

McRobbie, Angela; Gilroy, Paul and Grossberg, Lawrence, eds. 2000. Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1859842874

McRobbie, Angela, ed. 1997. Back to Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0719044557

McRobbie, Angela, ed. 1989. Zoot Suits and Second Hand Dresses. London: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 978-0044452379

McRobbie, Angela and Savier, M, eds. 1982. Autonome aber Wie? Munich: Frauenoffensive.

McRobbie, Angela and McCabe, Trisha, eds. 1980. Feminism for Girls. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1138007994

Edited Journal

McRobbie, Angela and Lury, Celia, eds. 2002. Feminism and the Political, Economy and Society, 31(4). 0308-5147

Book Section

Hey, Valerie and George, Rosalyn P.. 2016. Dissident daughters? The psychic life of class inheritance. In: Carrie F. Paechter; Rosalyn P. George and Angela McRobbie, eds. Pedagogical Responses to the Changing Position of Girls and Young Women. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 95-110. ISBN 9781138654921

McRobbie, Angela. 2012. Transient Intimacy in Queer Club Spaces. In: Angela McRobbie; Birgit Effinger; Judith Halberstam and Kerstin Drechsel, eds. Kerstin Drechsel. Munich: Hatje Cantz; Bilingual edition. ISBN 978-3775732512

McRobbie, Angela. 2012. A Good Job Well Done: Richard Sennett and the Politics of Creative Labour. In: Michael Heinlein; Cordula Kropp; Judith Neumer; Angelika Poferl and Regina Römhild, eds. Futures of Modernity Challenges for Cosmopolitical Thought and Practice. transcript Verlag Bielefeld (Sociology), pp. 155-177. ISBN 978-3-8376-2076-4

McRobbie, Angela. 2011. Key Concepts for Urban Creative Industry in the UK. In: Ingrid Elam, ed. New Creative Economy. Malmo, Sweden: Swedish Arts Council, pp. 22-42. ISBN 978-9-197-80011-2

McRobbie, Angela. 2011. Making a Living in London’s Small Scale Creative Sector. In: Dominic Power and Allan J Scott, eds. Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture. London and NY: Routledge, pp. 130-144. ISBN 978-0415511315

McRobbie, Angela. 2010. The Gender of Post-Fordism. In: A Manske and K Puhl, eds. Prekariserung aus Genderperspective. Dampfboot Verlag.

McRobbie, Angela. 2009. Industria Cultural. In: J Ribalta, ed. Ideas Recibidas. Spain: MacBa.

Article

McRobbie, Angela. 2020. Inside the socialist nursery: welfare maternity and the writing of Denise Riley. Feminist Theory, 21(3), pp. 287-296. ISSN 1464-7001

McRobbie, Angela; Wallach Scott, Joan and Taylor, Barbara. 2020. History, language, time. Feminist Theory, 21(3), pp. 263-266. ISSN 1464-7001

McRobbie, Angela. 2020. Our low-paid workers are our lifeline. Verso Blog,

McRobbie, Angela; Strutt, Dan and Bandinelli, Carolina. 2019. Feminism and the Politics of Creative Labour: Fashion Micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan. Australian Feminist Studies, 34(100), pp. 131-148. ISSN 0816-4649

McRobbie, Angela. 2016. Towards a Sociology of Fashion Micro-enterprises: Methods for Creative Economy Research. Sociology, 50(5), pp. 934-948. ISSN 0038-0385

McRobbie, Angela. 2016. Stuart Hall, Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production. South Atlantic Quarterly, 115(4), pp. 665-683. ISSN 0038-2876

McRobbie, Angela. 2015. Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83), pp. 3-20. ISSN 0816-4649

McRobbie, Angela. 2013. Feminism, the Family and the New 'Mediated' Maternalism. New Formations, 80, pp. 119-137. ISSN 0950-2378

McRobbie, Angela. 2013. Feminism and the New 'Mediated' Maternalism: Human Capital at Home. Feministische Studien, 31(1), pp. 136-143. ISSN 0723-5186

McRobbie, Angela. 2011. Unveiling France's Border Strategies. Feminist Media Studies, 11(1), pp. 101-106. ISSN 1468-0777

McRobbie, Angela and Thornton, Sarah L. 1995. Re-Conceptualising Moral Panic in Multi-mediated Social Worlds. British Journal of Sociology, 46(4), pp. 559-574.

Conference or Workshop Item

McRobbie, Angela. 2015. 'Pathologies of the Perfect: Femininity as Competition in Neo-Liberal Times'. In: Opening Lecture for Centre for Feminist Research. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom.

Bates, Laura; Lewis, Gail; McRobbie, Angela; Cameron, Deborah; Eddo-Lodge, Reni; Williamson, Judith; Dahl, Ulrika; Franklin, Sarah and Power, Nina. 2014. 'Workshop on Sexism'. In: Workshop on Sexism. Goldsmiths, Universirty of London, United Kingdom.

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