Research Seminar: The Trauma Machine: Reality Television, Bureaucracies of Care and the Regime of ‘Crisis Ordinariness’

This event forms part of the Research Seminar Series in the School of Media and Communication.

This talk will discuss the ongoing relationship between media culture and mental health through some of the findings of the AHRC research project ‘ReCARETV: Reality television, working practices and duties of care’. Reality television has a longstanding relationship with emotional breakdown as spectacle and has led to tragic outcomes for a number of participants. This paper analyses the developing discipline of ‘care’ that has emerged in the UK in response to these issues and argues that given the latest scandals in UK reality television, the trauma machine is sustained, rather than dismantled, by the complex bureaucratisation of care that has evolved. In managing trauma, reality television’s cultural mode of production mimics the conditions of late-stage capitalism whereby poor mental health is simply part of an ongoing ‘crisis ordinariness’ (Berlant, 2007) that extends the damaging conditions of production for human life.

Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Aston University. Her research interests are mainly in class, gender and the media. She has published widely on reality television and popular culture and has conducted research funded by the ESRC, British Academy and the AHRC. She has been a long-serving editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and serves on the boards of a number of media journals. Her current research project is the AHRC 'ReCARETV: Reality Television, working practices and duties of care' with project partners: DCMS select committee, and the union's Equity and BECTU. The project investigates how care is understood in production and policy, how the working experiences of participants can inform our understanding of care in reality television, and how the analysis of care can be incorporated into theorisations of cultural labour in the creative industries.