Sean Nixon – författare

Since 1997 Representation has been the go-to textbook for students learning the tools to question and critically analyze media texts and images. This long-awaited third edition has been updated throughout to engage with the impact of digital technology and culture, and the changes in political culture, social movements and the cultural industries. The new edition includes: 

A new preface by Sean Nixon, focusing on digital media, and theories of representation. A new Afterword by Kobena Mercer to Stuart Hall’s classic chapter on ‘The Spectacle of the Other’Revised chapters with additional content on digital media, de-westernising culture, imperialism and BLM, and new readings tying contemporary issues of race, gender and powerA new chapter by Nancy Thumim exploring digital forms of self-representation and representation in/of Politics, looking at media spectacle, political imagery, the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter.

The Third Edition provides an indispensable resource for students and teachers in cultural and media studies.

Whether as sources of joy and pleasure to be fed, counted, and watched, as objects of sport to be hunted and killed, or as food to be harvested, wild birds evoke strong feelings.Sean Nixon traces the transformation of these human passions for wild birds from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, detailing humans' close encounters with wild birds in Britain and the wider North Atlantic world. Drawing on a rich range of written sources, Passions for Birds reveals how emotional, subjective, and material attachments to wild birds were forged through a period of pronounced social and cultural change. Nixon demonstrates how, for all their differences, new traditions in birdwatching and conservation, field sports, and bird harvesting mobilized remarkably similar feelings towards birds. Striking similarities also emerged in the material forms that each of these practices used to bring birds closer to people – hides and traps, nets and ropes, and binoculars.Wide ranging in scope, Passions for Birds sheds new light on the ways in which wild birds helped shape humans throughout the twentieth century, as well as how birds themselves became burdened with multiple cultural meanings and social anxieties over time.

`Nixon's study is a major contribution to the cultural sociology of the new service sector professionals and their gendered identities.It's importance lies in it's skilful synthesis of detailed ethnographic research and social theory. This is a genuinely innovative book which reopens cultural debate about advertising and society' - Frank Mort, Professor of Cultural History, University of East London

`Advertising Cultures is a lucid, thorough and highly engaging account of advertising creatives that unlocks two crucial issues for understanding the culture industries: creativity and gender. It marks a major new contribution to the cultural study of economic life' - Don Slater, London School of Economics

The economic and cultural role of the `creative industries' has gained a new prominence and centrality in recent years. This new salience is explored here through the most emblematic creative industry: advertising.

Advertising Cultures also marks a significant contribution to the study of gender and of commercial cultures through its detailing of the way gender is written into the creative cultures of advertising and into the subjective identities of its key practitioners.

Since 1997 Representation has been the go-to textbook for students learning the tools to question and critically analyze media texts and images. This long-awaited third edition has been updated throughout to engage with the impact of digital technology and culture, and the changes in political culture, social movements and the cultural industries. The new edition includes: 

A new preface by Sean Nixon, focusing on digital media, and theories of representation. A new Afterword by Kobena Mercer to Stuart Hall’s classic chapter on ‘The Spectacle of the Other’Revised chapters with additional content on digital media, de-westernising culture, imperialism and BLM, and new readings tying contemporary issues of race, gender and powerA new chapter by Nancy Thumim exploring digital forms of self-representation and representation in/of Politics, looking at media spectacle, political imagery, the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter.

The Third Edition provides an indispensable resource for students and teachers in cultural and media studies.

Focusing on advertising’s relationship to the mass market housewife, this study shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the ‘modern housewife’ across the new medium of television. Nixon shows how the practices through which advertising understood and represented the ‘modern housewife’ and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In doing so, he challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations, and shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice were not only a source of inspiration, but were also adapted and reworked to speak more effectively to the British consumer.Now available in paperback, Hard sell offers a major new analysis of the techniques of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and advertising’s relationship to the social changes associated with growing prosperity.

Hard Looks is a fascinating examination of the new masculine imagery that has developed in relation to popular consumption over the last decade. the author skilfully investigates the development of this 'new man' imagery and its relationship to contemporary formations of masculinity and masculine culture. Focusing on the emergence in the mid-1980s of a wide range of new representations of masculinity in the retail, advertising and publishing industries, the author analyses the practices and derives used to underpin the production and circulation of this imagery. The author traces the novelty of these commercially produced representations and analyses their role in producing a space for an ambivalent masculine sexual identity. Drawing strongly on contemporary cultural theory, Hard Looks combines stimulating theoretical debates on representation and cultural identity with authoritative empirical research on the media and retail industries. This lively and innovative study will prove essential reading for sociologists interested in the study of men and masculinities and students of culture, media and gender studies.

`Nixon's study is a major contribution to the cultural sociology of the new service sector professionals and their gendered identities.It's importance lies in it's skilful synthesis of detailed ethnographic research and social theory. This is a genuinely innovative book which reopens cultural debate about advertising and society' - Frank Mort, Professor of Cultural History, University of East London

`Advertising Cultures is a lucid, thorough and highly engaging account of advertising creatives that unlocks two crucial issues for understanding the culture industries: creativity and gender. It marks a major new contribution to the cultural study of economic life' - Don Slater, London School of Economics

The economic and cultural role of the `creative industries' has gained a new prominence and centrality in recent years. This new salience is explored here through the most emblematic creative industry: advertising.

Advertising Cultures also marks a significant contribution to the study of gender and of commercial cultures through its detailing of the way gender is written into the creative cultures of advertising and into the subjective identities of its key practitioners.