Olu Jenzen is Professor of Media and Digital Culture at the University of Southampton, UK and the Deputy Head of Research in the Winchester School of Art. She previously directed the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender at the University of Brighton. She is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Protest (2020) and Global Queer and Feminist Visual Activism (2022) and has published in journals such as Sexualities, Convergence, Feminist Media Studies and Social Movement Studies. Her research focuses on social justice and digital cultures, media and technologies, as well as participatory and creative methods for studying them. Key areas of expertise include digital culture and visual activism and LGBTQ+ digital youth cultures.
She is a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, and an editorial board member of journals such as Journal of Visual Political Communication and The Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change. She has held visiting research fellowships in the Department of Communication and Media, University of Lund, Sweden and the Centre of Social Movement Studies, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy. She has led research as PI and Co-I across national and international projects.
Selected research projects
LGBTQ+ youth and access to HE
This HEFCE-funded collaborative research with Allsorts Youth Project sought to gain a youth perspective on the challenges young LGBTQ+ people face in accessing HE in the UK. Using participatory creative methods, including the co-creation of a short advocacy film, as well as interviews with young people and University staff, we found that there were particular barriers facing transgender students and we examine these more in detail in an article in the Journal of Sexualities. The article contributes to gender and education research by foregrounding the experience of trans students on the cusp of entering HE, illustrating how they navigate challenges around the lived environment, bureaucracy and policy. Focusing on trans students’ experiences of planning for and applying to University, the article contributes to empirical research by foregrounding trans students’ lived experience and by articulating our findings through the lens of liveability. This research concludes that the role of HE as a place where people live, and its commitments to equality and inclusion, seemed for these young people, frustratingly disconnected, because of the formulation of trans identity as an abstract and intellectual issue that could be debated. We found examples of good practice, demonstrating possibilities for gender inclusion, but often these instances rely on factors such as the goodwill of staff and the social and cultural capital of particular students to have confidence, time and energy to drive questions of gender equality and access, which arguably creates a situation that furthers intersecting inequalities. In sum, there is more Universities can do to counter systemic inequalities. Leveraging this research, I have advocated at my own place of work for a post-graduate scholarship to support the building of research capacity in and around trans communities.
5GXR – Exploring the potential for 5G for the games and performing arts sector in UK and Turkey
This AHRC funded project is an international collaborative research project between the UK and Turkey, aimed at bringing together academia and industry to explore new creative possibilities afforded by 5G. 5G is predicted to have a big impact on the way culture is made and shared, locally and internationally, face-to-face and virtually, creating the potential for new collaborations between makers and producers across performing arts, games and digital media. Working with academic and creative industry partners in Istanbul and Brighton, the project also explored what artists and practitioners from the performing arts and games sector bring to the critical understanding and practical application of 5G. A highlight of the project was the Meet the Makers bilingual (English and Turkish) event in 2020, delivered on the online platform Discord, and bringing together independent creative industry stakeholders as well as representatives from the technology sector.
The Aesthetics of Protest: Visual Culture and Communication in Turkey
This interdisciplinary study funded by the AHRC brings together big data approaches and visual analysis to explore contemporary protest through the lens of aesthetics and form. With a focus on images, symbols, graffiti, forms of rhetoric, humour, and slogans, the project looked at collective actions both online and in public spaces, in the case of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013. Establishing the significant prevalence of visuals in protest communication across social media platforms, this research shows the importance of visual communication in online activism, offering a new direction to previous research which has primarily focused on the internet as text-based.
Some of the key themes developed in this project include how images play an important role in communicating protestors’ self-image and their understanding of protest, as do particular social media imaginaries, which are part of how a movement’s collective identity is constructed. In an article in Convergence we show how the concept of social media imaginaries also is useful to understand how protest movements conceptualise their media practices. The project team has written a book and numerous journal articles, which you can read more about here.
The People’s Pier: Popular Culture Heritage and Cultural Regeneration
This AHRC-funded connected communities project investigated community piers as an emerging form of community hubs. It focused on two related aspects of seaside piers and community connectivity; first how communities of place may be strengthened in their confidence by taking collective action to safeguard a local heritage asset like the pier and second how the community pier and its popular culture heritage can be utilised to build positive relationships across different groups and empower the community. Working with two community partners, The Clevedon Pier and Heritage Foundation and The Hastings Pier Charity the project sought to contribute to the understanding of the role of popular culture in relation to community development and culture-led regeneration. Drawing on the research, we co-produced a range of new location-based activities, including immersive audio trails, open-air pop-up cinema events and interactive installations in the visitor centre, featuring content collected through our oral history interviews with local residents. Some of our research on seaside pier dance venues was featured in a BBC documentary. In an academic article, we offer new perspectives on UK seaside culture by centring local residents’ use of seaside piers, hitherto mainly researched in connection with tourism. Using a combination of contextual archival research, participant observations, semi-structured interviews and oral history narratives, our article attempts a deliberate shift in focus where the leisure activities of a young local population are brought to the fore in the history of British seaside entertainment and, in particular, their experiences of pleasure piers in the post-war era. We also explore the potential for the concept of the ‘community pier’ in terms of nurturing seaside leisure cultures in the present and future.
qualifications
PhD (University of Sussex)
PG Cert Teaching and Learning in HE (University of Sussex)
MA Comparative Literature & Gender Studies (University of Lund)
BA Hons. Comparative Literature & Film Studies (University of Lund)
CV
A full CV is available on request
Olu Jenzen 