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Head of Media, Leeds Beckett University

Lisa Taylor is a working class academic and a media and cultural studies scholar. Her work explores how identity and self-worth are entwined in media representations such as lifestyle media and factual welfare programming; quotidian spaces such as the 'ordinary' garden; and ex-industrial locales where demolition and spatial change impacts on local communities.

Interested in making studying the media accessible to students, Lisa co-authored a media studies textbook with Andrew Willis 'Media Studies: Texts, Institutions and Audiences' (Blackwell, 1999) which was subsequently translated into several languages. Her work has explored popular cinema, music and film stardom (Prince) and reality television.

Lisa Taylor's PhD, published in 2008 'A Taste for Gardening' looked at the relationship between lifestyle garden media, gardeners and questions of taste, class and gender. Focusing on how gardens were represented in lifestyle television led to an empirical study of the 'ordinary' garden - a space shot through with classed and gendered aesthetic practices.

Lisa is interested in art and is a practising print maker.Her article, 'Etchings in the Attic' (2016) used memory and the Women's Liberation Movement to reflect on her feminist practice in the 1980s. Using sensuous ethnography in 'He's Making our North' (2016) she looked at the ways people from Yorkshire use David Hockney's landscape paintings to positively transform how they thought about the North.

Experience

  • –present
    Head of Media, Leeds Beckett University