Professor Lisa Blackman

Lisa Blackman works at the intersection of body studies, media psychology, and media and cultural theory. Her research focuses upon the broad areas of affect, subjectivity, the body and embodiment. She also has a keen interest in mental health research and activism and was one of the early pioneers of the Hearing Voices Movement. She has published six books across these areas and has developed modules in the department reflecting these interests. She came to the Department of MCCS in 1994 to develop critical media psychology with Professor Valerie Walkerdine, who she continues to collaborate with as Co-Editor of the journal 'Subjectivity' (also see 'Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies', 2001, Palgrave). Lisa was a Co-Head of Department from 2016-2019.

Her work in the area of embodiment and voice hearing has been recognised and commended for its innovative approach to mental health research and it has been acclaimed by the Hearing Voices Network, Intervoice, and has been taken up in professional psychiatric contexts ('Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience', 2001, Free Association Books). She is currently a Co-Investigator on a large interdisciplinary Australian Research Council research project called, 'Borderline Personality as Social Phenomena' led by Renata Kokanovic.

Her recent research is at the intersection of body studies and affect studies, and she has published two books in these areas: 'Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation', (2012, Sage), and 'Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science' (2019. Bloomsbury). She is also the Editor of the journal Body & Society (Sage). Her current research project charts the broken genealogy between narcissistic storytelling, military and psychological torture technologies and post-truth communication strategies. It is set within the context of three interrelated pandemics, Covid-19, domestic abuse, and systemic racism, and the politics of Brexit and Trumpism. It will culminate in a forthcoming book titled, 'Abuse Assemblages: Power, Post-Truth and Strategic Deception'.

She has been a member of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths since its inception and has been a Co-Director since 2016. She was the Principal Investigator on a British Academy funded project, 'Cultures of Consent: Examining the complexity of sexual misconduct and power within Universities' with Dr Yasmin Gunaratnam (Co-investigator) and Chloe Turner (Research Assistant).

Teaching

Lisa is currently the Co-convenor of the MA Media and Communications.

She also developed and teaches a third year/MA option, Embodiment and Experience, that has been running since 1998. The second edition of the book, 'The Body', that accompanies the module is to be published next year with Routledge (2021). The first edition was published in 2008 helping to inaugurate the transdisciplinary field of body studies.

Areas of supervision

Lisa supervises students across a range of interests, which cross media and cultural studies, body studies, and science studies. Currently she supervises students working within the field of affect studies and mediality; documentary film and feminist archives; and Feeling Kinship and Queer Image-Making, a Decolonial Approach. 

She has supervised 13 students to completion, which include theses in the areas of performance and affect; the intergenerational transmission of memory and diaspora; queer theory and transfeminisms; postfeminism and subjectivity; chick-lit - young women and sexualisation; the New Biologies (the microbiome and epigenetics); disaster journalism, suggestion and affect; Fukishima and Hauntological Analysis.

She is interested in supervising students across the broad areas of affect studies, body studies, media psychology, mental health, and hauntological approaches to archives and data analysis.

Research Interests

Her current research interests are in the areas of affect and contagion (particularly in the areas of social media); experimentation across art, science and humanities; media aesthetics; critical neuroscience; mediation. She is particularly interested in phenomena which have puzzled scientists, artists, literary writers and the popular imagination for centuries, including automatic writing, voice hearing, suggestion and automatism. Lisa is part of a Wellcome-funded project, "Hearing the Voice" and will be specifically collaborating on a subproject "Voices Beyond the Self" to run from 2017-2020.